Kehinde Wiley on how he fell in love with his craft and the message behind the art at Friday’s VMFA artist talk

Wiley was born in Los Angeles in 1977 to a single mother of six children. He spoke about being sent to art camp by his mother, in an effort to keep him and his brother off the dangerous streets of LA. At the age of 11, he first fell in love with the arts and realized he wanted to be a painter, like the masters he revered from museums.

Wiley received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999, as well as an MFA from Yale University in 2001. It was during his time at Yale that he first started to experiment with African American portraiture, creating a series of pictures depicting African American men sporting impossibly large afros.

“We’re looking at this as hair but we’re also looking at this as phallic,” said Wiley. “We’re looking at painting itself as a type of masculinist scape where the male gaze is the ultimate indicator of what the aesthetic should be driven by.”

After finishing graduate school, Wiley went to live in New York and to his dismay ruined his credit.

“I proceeded in the way of those who are at once hopeless and creative,” said Wiley. “The reason that my work gained a level of potency or interest was because it comes from a perspective of somebody who really didn’t give a fuck.”

He worked odd jobs and even thought he would have to be a professional chef, but all that changed when one fateful day Wiley came across a crumpled NYPD mug shot in the street.

The young black man in the mug shot inspired and intrigued Wiley, who began to think about mug shots as a kind of portraiture. This got him thinking about representations of young black men in contemporary culture, and their absence in the history of art and the walls of respected museums.

“I took that shard and began creating a series of studies and paintings,” said Wiley. “I actually went into the streets, talking to complete strangers, asking them to be part of this project.

Wiley casts subjects for his portraits with “street casting” whereby he stands on street corners with examples of his work and asks young men and women with interesting looks or gaits to model for him. He asks his models to flip through 18th and 19th century art history books and choose a portrait they want to recreate in a modern fashion.

“People begin to imagine themselves within those histories and those histories then become alive again,” said Wiley.

Wearing the clothes they were wearing on the street, Wiley’s models strike the pose of a classical aristocrat or warrior in their jeans and hoodies, an image that at once compliments and contrasts the ornate backgrounds that adorn them. By painting young black people in the place of historical white bodies, Wiley’s paintings point out the absence of African American subjects in historical artwork.

At first Wiley exclusively painted male subjects because he was interested in representing the performance of masculinity and how representations of masculinity have changed throughout history. Perhaps the best representation of this theme comes from Wiley’s piece “Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps”, a modernization of Jacques-Lous David’s famous portrait by the same name. Instead of painting the alps behind Napoleon’s frankly majestic stance, Wiley drew an ornamental design which he revealed during the talk to be large ovaries surrounded by tiny swimming sperm cells, painted using 24 carat gold leaf.

“It’s boiling the masculine down to its most essential components,” said Wiley.

In 2010 his work caught the attention of Michael Jackson, who commissioned Wiley to paint him in one of the more detailed portraits in the exhibition. The piece, entitled “Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II”, shows Jackson clad in shining armor and sitting atop a prancing horse. The armor he was painted in is apparently representative of Jackson’s struggle to contain the pressures of notoriety.

“He wanted to talk about the fame that he himself created, the war within and without that he himself created, and I think you can see that,” said Wiley.

In addition to representations of masculinity, the VMFA exhibition includes works from Wiley’s World Stage series, bronze busts, stained glass paintings and portraits of women. For the World Stage series, Wiley traveled around the world to countries including China, Africa, France, Israel, Jamaica, and Haiti.

“It’s not just one country, not just one colony, but it’s looking at the blast zone of black people starting in one part of the world and seeing the progression not only of their own displacement but also how they fashion dignity and maintain their sense of personal sovereignty around the world,” said Wiley.

His paintings began to take on new life as Wiley modeled his native subjects after classical art pieces from their own countries. The decorative European designs that adorn his earlier works are replaced by bright patterns and foliage inspired by indigenous artwork.

It was in Haiti during the World Stage series that Wiley first began to use female subjects in his works. Wiley didn’t paint these women in their street clothes because the women who are represented in art history had the advantage of money and access to the newest fashions. So, Wiley enlisted the help of Givenchy couture designer Riccardo Tisci to create modern versions of historic gowns for his subjects to model.

“It’s a kind of dignity that comes from artifice, the artifice that’s constantly demanded of women’s bodies in public space,” said Wiley. “The idea here is to create something that is both critical but also sort of sickeningly sweet, so it almost decays under its own weight.”

The Artist Talk concluded with a Q&A portion during which Coordinating curator for the VMFA, Dr. Sarah Eckhardt asked a few questions that had been collected from the audience. The first question concerned his beautiful golden suit and Wiley revealed, to the crowd’s delight, that it featured his own artwork on the lining.

When asked what advice he could give aspiring artists, Wiley quoted some wisdom that one of his professors told him.

“You must voraciously consume as much as you can and then proceed as though you’d never done it, so that your acts are informed and graceful at once. And I think at it’s best, when I get it right, that’s what’s going on,” said Wiley.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic is on loan from the Brooklyn Museum. It opened at the VMFA on Saturday, June 11th and will run until September 5th.