awards for arts achievement

Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendant of a long line of portraitists, Mr. Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and the sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found throughout the world. 

Initially, Mr. Wiley's portraits were based on photographs taken of young men found on the streets of Harlem. As his practice grew, his eye led him toward an international view, including models found in urban landscapes throughout the world such as Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar, and Rio de Janeiro, among others. The models—dressed in their everyday clothing, most of which are based on the notion of far-reaching Western ideals of style—are asked to assume poses found in paintings or sculptures representative of the history of their surroundings. This juxtaposition of the "old" inherited by the "new"—who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak—immediately provides a discourse that is at once visceral and cerebral in scope. Mr. Wiley's heroic paintings evoke a modern style instilling a unique and contemporary manner, awakening complex issues that many would prefer remain mute.

Kehinde Wiley received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 2001. Shortly thereafter he became an artist-in-residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem.  His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, where his solo exhibition The Word Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar is currently on view.