Musicians, songwriters, and producers Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys have stood as giants in the global cultural landscape for decades. As collectors, the Deans have lived their ethos of “artists supporting artists,” acquiring a world-class collection of paintings, photographs, and sculptures by diverse, multigenerational artists.

Roberts Projects is delighted to announce Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power at The Musée des Civilisations noires (Museum of Black Civilizations) in Dakar, Senegal. Initiated in 2012, the unprecedented series explores the staging of power through the lens of African heads of state. The portraits reflect the distinctive cultural elements of each state, thus highlighting the immense diversity of the African continent, and reveal the identity of an individual through the double prism of the artist and his model.

Interview by Kimberly Fisher

"When art inspires it creates a new way of seeing something in the world that previously was perceived as fixed or indelible. The great shifts that have happened socially and culturally throughout the world have often been helped by artists. Their ability to destabilize known narratives is at the core practice aimed at equity."

By Jori Finkel

To enter Kehinde Wiley’s show An Archaeology of Silence is to step into darkness, where only the art itself seems to emit light. The space feels somewhere between a crypt and a cathedral, featuring paintings and bronze sculptures of reclining Black bodies, spread out in repose or entombed like corpses, that appear to glow from within.

The show, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, culminates with a monumental sculpture of a fallen man on horseback, draped over the horse as if he had just been shot, his Nikes dangling below the saddle. Made in the year after George Floyd was killed by the police in Minneapolis, this monument—and more broadly, the show as a whole—confronts the “legacy and scope of anti-Black violence,” according to Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation.

Gordon Parks. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Lorna Simpson. Kehinde Wiley. Nina Chanel Abney. These names loom large in the past and present of art—as do many others in the collection of musical and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys. Expansive in their collecting habits, the Deans, both born and raised in New York, champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists.” The first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, Giants showcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings. The Brooklyn Museum’s presentation spotlights works by Black diasporic artists, part of our ongoing efforts to expand the art-historical narrative.

Kehinde Wiley is featured in Entagled Pasts: 1768 – Now at the Royal Academy of Art. The exhibition bring together major contemporary and historical works as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism – and how it may help set a course for the future.

Kehinde Wiley's A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, is currently at The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.  The large-scale portrait was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (ca. 1770). Commissioned through Roberts Projects, the new portrait celebrates the 100th anniversary of the purchase of the Gainsborough painting by Henry and Arabella Huntington, the founders of the institution.

Kehinde Wiley announces the release of his latest limited-edition print, Portrait of Marie-Agnès Diene, in alliance with Black Rock Sénégal and Kehinde Wiley Shop. This charitable partnership marks the fourth annual collaboration between the artist and Black Rock Sénégal, a dynamic artist-in-residence program in Dakar dedicated to fostering creative exchange and dialogue throughout the African diaspora. Since 2019, Black Rock Sénégal has partnered with Kehinde Wiley to produce a series of unique charitable print editions, with 100% of sale proceeds going directly towards the general operating support of Black Rock Sénégal.

Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence showcases Kehinde Wiley’s new, monumental body of work created against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The exhibition premiered earlier this year at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the MFAH is the first stop on the tour. Expanding upon his “Down” series from 2008, the American artist (born 1977) meditates on the deaths of young Black people slain around the world. The works in An Archaeology of Silence stand as elegies and monuments, underscoring the fraught terms in which Black people are rendered visible, especially at the hands of systemic violence.

Black Rock Senegal announces they are now accepting applications for the next cycle of the multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program located in Dakar, Senegal. Named for the volcanic rocks that blanket its shoreline, Black Rock is a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019. The residency brings together international artists to live and work in Dakar, Senegal for 1–3 month stays.

On the occasion of Kehinde Wiley's solo exhibition A Maze of Power at Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, l'Université populaire is inviting the artist as well as Sarah Ligner and Claire Tancons to discuss the representation of power. The conference "Le pouvoir a-t-il une image?" will take place on Wednesday, September 27, from 6:30pm to 8pm at the Théâtre Claude Lévi-Strauss. Sarah Ligner is the Head of the Historical and Contemporary Globalization Collection at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Claire Tancons is a curator and art historian.

Kehinde Wiley unveils an exclusive series of portraits of African heads of state. A project exploring the staging of power, on which the artist has been working confidentially since 2012. It was as a result of the election of Barack Obama in 2008 that Kehinde Wiley began to ponder the question of presidential leadership. In 2012, the American artist, whose work reinterprets representations of power and prestige in the history of portrait painting, imagined an original series dedicated to African heads of state.

By Dionne Searcey

The American artist Kehinde Wiley shot to fame in 2018 with his unconventional presidential portrait, at least as far as U.S. presidential portraiture goes: Barack Obama seated amid a brightly colored, flowery background. Now, Mr. Wiley is again breaking the mold with a series of portraits of 11 current and former African presidents in an exhibition that opened Monday in Paris.

Featuring more than 100 works drawn primarily from the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition spans more than two centuries and includes nineteenth-century studio photography; portraits from the Harlem Renaissance; images from the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter eras; pictures of Black celebrities and political figures; and artists’ self-portraits.

The lives of Black people are often flattened through the limited gaze of anti-Blackness and white supremacy. This conversation will explore the nuances of being Black through an interdisciplinary lens of storytellers, artists, scholars, faith leaders, and activists.

Black Rock Senegal announced today the 2023-2024 participants for the fourth year of its Artist-in-Residence program. Founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019, Black Rock Senegal seeks to support new artistic creation through collaborative exchange and to incite change in the global discourse about Africa. The fourth year of the program will run between August 2023 and May 2024 and will welcome sixteen artists from around the world.

By Dionne Searcey

“An Archaeology of Silence” opens in San Francisco, after a string of police killings of Black men. Along with powerful art, it offers a respite room to those needing a break.

Kehinde Wiley’s new body of paintings and sculptures confronts the silence surrounding systemic violence against Black people through the visual language of the fallen figure. It expands on his 2008 series, Down — a group of large-scale portraits of young Black men inspired by Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–1522). 

Led by Claudia Schmuckli, curator in charge of contemporary art and programming, this talk explores Kehinde Wiley’s new body of work that sheds light on the brutalities of American and global colonial pasts.

By Jessica Lynne

Kehinde Wiley is ebullient yet poised on the afternoon of our Zoom conversation. The painter — one of contemporary art’s most celebrated — joined from a sunlit room in Roberts Projects, where a new series, “Colorful Realm,” was being prepared to open to the public. 

By Jenny Hartman, Fiorella Valdesolo

Known for his portrait of Barack Obama, Kehinde Wiley has long repurposed European painting traditions to explore contemporary Black culture. For his latest body of work, at L.A.’s Roberts Projects through April 8, he looked to 18th-century Japanese artist Itō Jakuchū’s nature paintings, surrounding his subjects with delicate flora and fauna. The show, Colorful Realm, inaugurates the gallery’s new Mid-Wilshire space. More of Wiley’s canvases and sculptures will be on view at San Francisco’s de Young Museum from March 18 in Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence.

Sam Fragoso sits down with renowned artist Kehinde Wiley on the opening night of Colorful Realm, his new exhibition at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles.

“Portraiture is trying to approximate the temperature of someone. The way that they dress, the way that they see themselves as elevated. I encourage my models to go through art history books and look at the poses that old aristocrats were holding in original paintings.”  -Kehinde Wiley, episode 315 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

by Alayo Akinkugbe

The New York-based artist – who mixes Japanese Edo period landscaping with western easel painting traditions to dazzling effect – discusses his new exhibition in LA, and configuring Black bodies within “non-western models of freedom of space.”

Colorful Realm, an exhibition of new work by superstar L.A.-born artist Kehinde Wiley, opens at Roberts Projects on Jan. 21. The collection of nine paintings takes inspiration from the Edo period, blending Wiley’s signature style of portraiture with elements and techniques of Japanese nature paintings.

By Julian Lewis

Soliciting pedestrians in the Matongé neighborhood of Brussels, Kehinde Wiley, forty-five, looked more like a sidewalk canvasser than he did a world-famous artist. He sidled up to strangers in an orange hoodie and lime-green Air Jordans, extending a hand and flashing a gap-toothed grin.

What’s Going On features nearly 200 works by an eclectic mix of around 40 well-known contemporary artists from the collection of the Miami-based art collectors Don and Mera Rubell. The title of the show references Marvin Gaye’s seminal 1971 album of the same name and its anthemic titular single, which decried injustice and other social ills. Gaye was a student at the long-closed Randall Junior High School, which has been converted by the New York-based firm Beyer Blinder Belle Architects to house the new museum.

As part of the Reiffers Art Initiatives mentorship 2022, Kehinde Wiley will mentor the young French-Senegalese artist Alexandre Diop. This collaboration will result in an exhibition at the Acacias Art Center – Reiffers Art Initiatives from October 19 – November 19, 2022.

Metal of Honor: Gold from Simone Martini to Contemporary Art explores how four artists, of different times and different places, use gold as an artistic strategy for innovation and honor. Works by Simone Martini (c. 1284-1344, Italy), whose novel compositions and masterful techniques were unequaled in Europe and well ahead of his time, are juxtaposed with works by three contemporary painters—Kehinde Wiley, Stacy Lynn Waddell, and Titus Kaphar.

Spanning over two centuries from around 1800 to the present day, Black American Portraits chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes.

In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection includes a selection of paintings and works on paper collected by Iris and Adam Singer over the span of 16 years. Anchored by the work of 27 contemporary artists living and working in cities such as London, Beijing, New York, New Haven, Los Angeles, Accra, and Nairobi, In Our Time speaks to the immediacy of this moment on a global scale, as well as the key ideas, narratives, and concerns that artists have been exploring over the past 25 years.

As an extension of the Kehinde Wiley exhibition, organized at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini during the 59th Venice Biennale, the Musée d’Orsay is displaying three monumental works by the artist within its Nave: a painting, Femme piquée par un serpent (Woman Bitten By A Snake) (Mamadou Gueye), and two recently-completed sculptures (An Archeology of Silence and The Young Tarantine).

Interview by Shaquille Heath

Kehinde Wiley discusses his artistic practice, current projects and upcoming exhibition at Roberts Projects opening this fall.

I specifically remember the moment I saw my first Kehinde Wiley work, strolling about the Seattle Art Museum when they exhibited A New Republic. I remember looking up at Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps, ready for the horseman to jump out of the canvas - and trample me – with both hooves and Timbs.

Drawn from the acclaimed Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida, 30 Americans showcases works by some of the most significant artists of the last four decades, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Hank Willis Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley.

DAKAR, Senegal, June 27, 2022 — Black Rock Senegal announced today the 2022-2023 participants for the third year of its Artist-in-Residence program. Founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019, Black Rock Senegal seeks to support new artistic creation through collaborative exchange and to incite change in the global discourse about Africa. The third year of the program will run between July 2022 and March 2023 and will welcome sixteen artists from around the world.

Inspired by Holbein's The Dead Christ in the Tomb, as well as historical paintings and sculptures of fallen warriors and figures in the resting state, the American artist has created a haunting series of prone black bodies, reconceptualizing classical pictorial forms to create a contemporary take on portraiture. For this new body of work, Wiley sheds light on the brutalities of American and global colonial pasts using the language of the fallen hero.

This exhibition pairs two monumental paintings created 400 years apart—one by Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian artist and one of the most successful female painters of the 17th century, and the second by Kehinde Wiley, a Black American contemporary artist celebrated for his recontextualization of Old Master paintings. The subject, Judith and Holofernes, appears repeatedly throughout art history with well-known works by Caravaggio, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Sandro Botticelli, Gustav Klimt, and many others. Taken from the Book of Judith, the tale recounts how a Jewish widow saved the town of Bethulia from the Assyrian army by seducing and then beheading General Holofernes.

Curated by Christophe Leribault, An Archaeology of Silence includes a collection of new monumental paintings and sculptures, expanding on Kehinde Wiley's body of work DOWN from 2008. Initially inspired by Holbein’s painting The Dead Christ in the Tomb as well as historical paintings and sculptures of fallen warriors and figures in the state of repose, Wiley created an unsettling series of prone Black bodies, re-conceptualizing classical pictorial forms to create a contemporary version of monumental portraiture, resounding with violence, pain, and death, as well as ecstasy.

Art:LIVE is a series of original video content that brings to the viewer accessible expert insights into recent developments in contemporary art and culture, produced in partnership with Frieze’s Global Lead Partner Deutsche Bank. This edition will feature renowned Los Angeles-born artist Kehinde Wiley who talks to Art:LIVE about his career – including being commissioned for the presidential portrait of Barack Obama, recently on view at LACMA, new work on view at Huntington Library in Los Angeles – participating as a juror in this year’s Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award.

Crenshaw is a neighborhood in transition. Construction of a light rail line connecting Crenshaw and LAX airport and the opening of SoFi Stadium in nearby Inglewood have boosted home values and brought in new businesses, while accelerating gentrification and displacement. Destination Crenshaw was incorporated as a non-profit in November 2017 to draw attention to the area’s Black history and culture.

The Obama Portraits Tour, organized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, will travel to five cities across the U.S. from June 2021 through May 2022 and is expected to reach millions of people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to view these remarkable paintings. In addition to the artworks themselves, The Obama Portraits Tour will feature audio-visual elements, educational workshops, and curatorial presentations.

Featuring Wangari Mathenge, Otis Kwame Kye Quiacoe, Betye Saar and Kehinde Wiley.

To complement the presentation of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald on tour from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), LACMA presents Black American Portraits. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces.

Kehinde Wiley will participate in a special collaboration with Interscope Records in celebration of their 30th anniversary. For this project, Interscope commissioned 30 artists to reimagine the covers of iconic albums produced by the record label since its inception. Kehinde created a portrait of Dr. Dre for the re-release of a limited edition run of his album 2001. The resulting painting will be on show at Los Angeles County Museum of Art from January 30 – February 13, 2022 as part of the exhibition “Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined.”

Podcast hosted by Ben Luke

An in-depth interview on the artist's influences and cultural experiences, from Richard Dyer to John Singer Sargent. Perhaps more than any other contemporary artist, Wiley has situated himself within the history of Western portrait painting. He makes direct reference to the art of the past, quoting from artists like Holbein, Titian, Rubens, Gainsborough and David, but replacing the royal, noble and ecclesiastical figures depicted by the Old Masters with ordinary people he has encountered on the street.

Launched in 2020 the Kehinde Wiley Shop began as a partnership between Kehinde Wiley and Black Rock Senegal to create limited-edition apparel and merchandise featuring a selection of the artist’s personal favorite compositions from his archive that would support Black Rock Senegal, the non-profit artist-in-residence program founded by Wiley in Dakar, Senegal in 2019.

In this exhibition, Kehinde Wiley shifts his focus from one European tradition - Grand Manner portraiture – to another – landscape painting. Through new artworks, including film and painting, Wiley looks at European Romanticism and its focus on epic scenes of oceans and mountains, building relationships with our collection of historical landscapes and seascapes by Turner, Claude, Vernet and Friedrich. Like his work before, this new work will look back at Old Masters as a way to create new connections and raise fresh questions.

For this landmark exhibition, Wiley has invited a selection of contemporary African artists living throughout the world to each produce a self-portrait. Together these portraits will present a new exploration of identity, perception, and self-regard within the global stage through the lens of figuration, exploring notions of perspective, authorship and control within acts of expression that directly address the self. All proceeds benefit Black Rock Senegal, a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program founded by Kehinde Wiley in Dakar, Senegal. Self-Addressed will open at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles on November 6, 2021.

The Obama Portraits Tour, organized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, will travel to five cities across the U.S. from June 2021 through May 2022 and is expected to reach millions of people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to view these remarkable paintings. In addition to the artworks themselves, The Obama Portraits Tour will feature audio-visual elements, educational workshops, and curatorial presentations. This special presentation will exchange the conversations surrounding the power of portraiture and its potential to engage communities.

The City of Los Angeles’s Cultural Affairs Commission has approved plans for the initial stage of Destination Crenshaw, the $100 million public art and environmental revitalization project that aims to turn a 1.3-mile-long stretch of South Los Angeles into a hub for Black arts and culture.  Kehinde Wiley and Brenna Youngblood are two of the artists commissioned for the project.

Destination Crenshaw, the 1.3-mile public art corridor on Crenshaw Boulevard with a lineup of top names including Kehinde Wiley and Alison Saar, had kept its works of art tightly under wraps while awaiting a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission vote. On Wednesday, the commission greenlighted plans for all seven permanent installations scheduled to debut in the first phase of the project in fall 2022. Fundraising for the $100 million Destination Crenshaw — which now stands at $61.5 million — is getting a boost from DeMar DeRozan, a Chicago Bulls player, who will lead a new private fundraising drive, organizers said.

Black Rock Senegal, Kehinde Wiley and Roberts Projects are pleased to announce Dimietrus Study (2021), the third annual limited edition print to support the Black Rock Senegal artist-in-residence program. All net proceeds from the signed edition of 30 prints will benefit Black Rock as a charitable contribution.

Kehinde Wiley’s Dimietrus Study (2021) features a portrait of a young, Black New Yorker amidst a wreath of pink and blue flora that Wiley originally created in 2008. Returning to the composition, Wiley explains, “This portrait continues a theme that exists within the selection of prints I have made for Black Rock Senegal.

Black Rock Senegal announces applications are open for the 2022 cycle of multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program located in Dakar, Senegal. After two successful years welcoming over thirty artists from around the world to Kehinde Wiley's coastal compound, we Black Rock Senegal is thrilled to once again open doors to a new cohort of artists for the 2022 artist-in-residency cycle.

Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens has commissioned Kehinde Wiley to create a new work inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (ca. 1770). Wiley’s A Portrait of a Young Gentleman (also the original title of the Gainsborough painting) will be a large-scale portrait in the Grand Manner style that will be added to The Huntington’s permanent collection. The new painting will be on view from Oct. 2, 2021, through Jan. 3, 2022, in The Huntington’s Thornton Portrait Gallery, opposite the institution’s iconic and recently restored Blue Boy. The acquisition of the Wiley portrait celebrates the 100th anniversary of the purchase of the Gainsborough painting by Henry and Arabella Huntington, the founders of the institution.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce Kehinde Wiley will be participating in Destination Crenshaw with a new monumental sculpture commission. Wiley’s bronze equestrian monument, featuring a young Senegalese woman as the rider, continues his series “Rumors of War,” an ongoing response to Confederate statues still standing in the U.S. despite the national reckoning on race and inequality. 

By Makeda Easter for Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will honor contemporary artists Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley and filmmaker Steven Spielberg at its 2021 Art + Film Gala, the museum is expected to announce Wednesday. As LACMA’s premier fundraiser, the 10th annual event on Nov. 6 will bring together art and fashion figures, civic leaders and celebrities. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, last year’s in-person gala was canceled and the museum did not honor any new artists or filmmakers during an intimate virtual gathering. The 2019 gala honoring assemblage artist Betye Saar and “Roma” writer-director Alfonso Cuarón raised more than $4.6 million for the museum.

Kehinde Wiley is pleased to announce the newest product to benefit Black Rock Senegal. The Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence) Notebook draws inspiration from an artwork by Kehinde Wiley of the same name, made by the artist while he was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001. This early work is part of a larger series which emphasizes and explores the beauty of natural black hair.

Kehinde Wiley’s Leviathan Zodiac (2011) from The World Stage: Israel series, was recently acquired by Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida for their permanent collection. An important addition to the museum’s holdings, the painting is now on display in the institution’s newly renovated Great Hall. The World Stage: Israel was presented at Roberts & Tilton (2011) and traveled to the Jewish Museum, New York, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco and Boise Art Museum.

By Jay Cheshes for Wall Street Journal Magazine

As lockdowns began spreading around the world last winter, artist Kehinde Wiley, 43, was working in Norway, shooting footage in the fjords for an upcoming show exploring the European landscape and seascape traditions—an “epic painting and film project,” he calls it—opening late this year at the National Gallery in London. “Gorgeous,” he says, of the Nordic locale, “but then, of course, the reality of the pandemic started to make itself clear.”

Inspired by the late David Driskell’s landmark 1976 exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” the documentary "Black Art: In the Absence of Light" offers an illuminating introduction to the work of some of the foremost Black visual artists working today.  Directed by Sam Pollard (Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children) the film shines a light on the extraordinary impact of Driskell’s exhibit on generations of Black artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-Century art world.

By Dionne Searcey for The New York Times

A Congolese painter whose art reflects how globalization and consumerism have transformed African society. A Nigerian-American filmmaker whose work focuses on cultures and experiences of Africans and the diaspora. A visual activist from Texas who forces her viewers to confront issues that are deemed difficult to tackle. These are among the 16 artists selected for the 2021 residency at Black Rock Senegal, the seaside studio in the West African capital city of Dakar belonging to Kehinde Wiley, the painter best known for his portrait of former President Barack Obama.

Black Rock Senegal today announced the 2021 participants for the second year of its Artist-in-Residence program. Founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019, Black Rock Senegal seeks to support new artistic creation through collaborative exchange and to incite change in the global discourse about Africa. The second year of the program will run between February and December 2021.

On December 30, 2020, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced the opening of the new Moynihan Train Hall, along with Kehinde Wiley's site-specific art installation Go, 2020. Commanding the expansive ceiling of the 33rd Street Midblock Entrance Hall, Wiley’s hand-painted glass triptych celebrates the vibrancy and virtuosity of bodies in motion at monumental scale.

Kehinde Wiley's second annual charitable print to support Black Rock Senegal is now available.  Named for the volcanic rocks that blanket its shoreline, Black Rock is a residency program created by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley which seeks to incite change in the global discourse around West Africa in the context of creative evolution.

Kehinde Wiley is participating in 30 Americans, an exhibition showcasing many of the most important contemporary artists from across the United States. Created from the 1970s to present, the artworks, including paintings, installations, sculptures, and videos, are aesthetically and thematically diverse. This provocative exhibition explores how artists shed light on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity.

Kehinde Wiley is participating in Memling Now: Hans Memling in Contemporary Art, with paintings inspired by Hans Memling, one of the most significant painters of the Burgundian Bruges genre. The exhibition brings together five contemporary artists whose work has and continues to find inspiration in Memling’s enduring masterpieces, including his world-renowned Ursula Shrine. Works both old and new by the invited artists are being integrated into the existing display of Memling works at the Sint-Janshospitaal, a centuries’ old hospital that has been recently completely restored and serves as a museum for the works of Hans Memling.

In 2017, Wiley made his first ever film installation. Narrenschiff (German for Ship of Fools) is a three-channel digital projection with direct reference to the 15th-century book of the same title by the German theologian, Sebastian Brant. The book satirised politicians, clerics and other well-known or influential people and was a huge success of the time, narrating the story of a crew of fools lost at sea.

By Dionne Searcey for The New York Times

When Covid-19 started spreading across the globe in late winter and some nations began sealing their borders, the American artist Kehinde Wiley was abroad and quickly had to decide where he wanted to ride out the coming viral storm. He chose Dakar, Senegal, site of his spacious, magnificently windswept Black Rock studio complex on the sea.

As part of Sotheby's 500 Years of Art: Summer Talks series, Kehinde Wiley and the Duke of Devonshire explore the ways in which contemporary artists are inspired and influenced by the great art of the past, referencing it to explore ideas about identity, status and culture.

Drawing inspiration from the Old Masters, from Titian and Gainsborough to Van Dyck and Ingres, Kehinde Wiley: Peintre de L'Épopée presents twenty works centered around a uniquely political and aesthetic perspective, making visible history’s invisible figures, allowing the viewer to engage with the notions of perception as it pertains to power and place.
 

This has been a remarkable year for Black Rock Senegal which opened its doors in May 2019, sharing Kehinde Wiley’s magnificent vision with friends from near and far. In August 2019, Black Rock launched the inaugural year of the artist residency, welcoming the first three artists to live and make work on the compound. As of today, Black Rock has hosted 15 artists working in literature, multimedia, painting, photography, sculpture and textiles.

The Yellow Wallpaper is an exhibition of new portraits by American artist Kehinde Wiley. This will be the first solo exhibition of new work shown by Wiley at a UK museum and also the first to feature exclusively female portraits. The works feature women that the artist met on the streets of Dalston and offer a visual response to American novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s acclaimed feminist text, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

‘The Yellow Wallpaper is a work of literary fiction that explores the contours of femininity and insanity. This exhibition seeks to use the language of the decorative to reconcile blackness, gender, and a beautiful and terrible past.’ — Kehinde Wiley

By Jason Farago for The New York Times

A French masterpiece has come to New York for the first time ever, and has been greeted with a curious silence.

It’s Jacques-Louis David’s “Bonaparte Crossing the Alps,” from 1801, and you know it even if you’ve never seen it in person, so enduring is its propaganda. To commemorate Napoleon’s victory over Austria at the Battle of Marengo, David painted him charging up a mountain on a piebald steed, right arm pointing skyward, trademark bicorne on his head, cool and cocksure as his horse bucks its front heels. In copies the artist and his studio made afterward Napoleon wears a red cape, but here, in the original, he’s wrapped in a mantle of gold, starchy and solid in the Alpine air.

Kehinde Wiley’s triumphant Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), a hallmark of our collection, comes face to face with the nineteenth-century painting on which it is based: Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1800–1). The unprecedented pairing of these two magisterial portraits, in the exhibition Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley, also marks the first time David’s original version of Bonaparte Crossing the Alps is on view in New York.

As a direct response to the Confederate statues that line Monument Avenue in Richmond, Kehinde Wiley conceived the idea for Rumors of War when he visited the city in 2016 for the opening of Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic at VMFA. Rumors of War takes its inspiration from the statue of Confederate Army General James Ewell Brown “J.E.B.” Stuart created by Frederick Moynihan in 1907. As with the original sculpture, the rider strikes a heroic pose while sitting upon a muscular horse. However, in Wiley’s sculpture, the figure is a young African American dressed in urban streetwear. Proudly mounted on its large stone pedestal, the bronze sculpture commemorates African American youth lost to the social and political battles being waged throughout our nation. Photo by Travis Fullerton © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

In a special event hosted by Creative Minds Talks, Kehinde Wiley will be joined by producer, philanthropist, and close friend Kasseem "Swizz Beatz" Dean for a conversation about art, philanthropy, and empowerment.

Kehinde Wiley’s triumphant Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), a hallmark of Brooklyn Museum's collection, comes face to face with the nineteenth-century painting on which it is based: Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). The unprecedented pairing of these two magisterial portraits, in the exhibition Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley, also marks the first time David’s original version of Napoleon Crossing the Alps will be on view in New York at Brooklyn Museum, January 24 – May 10, 2020.  Seen together, the works by David and Wiley reveal how race, masculinity, power, and representation layer onto portraiture and shape the writing of history.

Black Rock Senegal announces the official selection of artists for the inaugural year of its artist-in-residence program developed by Kehinde Wiley.

Published for the artist's solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum (October 19, 2018 - February 10, 2019), this new series of paintings by Brooklyn-based painter Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) re-envisions the museum's holdings as a starting point for succinct observations about representation throughout the history of art.

The award celebrates Gordon Parks’ legacy and honors those who continue Park’s vision for social change through their work in the arts and humanitarianism. 

A new multi-disciplinary artist-in-residency program in Dakar, Senegal.

The new series of paintings re-envisions the museum’s holdings of masterpieces as a starting point for succinct observations about representation throughout the history of art.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce TIME named Kehinde Wiley to the 2018 TIME 100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce the unveiling of Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, a retrospective of the artist’s prolific career featuring sixty paintings and sculptures. Kehinde Wiley’s work raises questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture.

Kehinde Wiley received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design on Saturday, June 3rd, 2017. As a descendant of a long line of classical portrait painters, Kehinde Wiley uses the visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and sublime in his representations of contemporary urban people of color. (Image: Kehinde Wiley; photo Tony Powell, courtesy of Art in Embassies, US Department of State.)

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic presents a stunning retrospective of this artist’s prolific career through nearly 60 paintings and sculptures. Wiley’s work raises intriguing questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture.

Kehinde Wiley is one of the leading American artists to emerge in the last decade and he has been ingeniously reworking the grand portraiture traditions.

By Mike Bickal of ABC News

CBS News senior correspondent Rita Braver profiles Kehinde Wiley and visits the artist’s traveling retrospective exhibition “A New Republic.” “If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world,” said Kehinde Wiley. “What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.”