Kehinde Wiley Sculpture Commission for Destination Crenshaw, Los Angeles

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. Wiley's sculpture is specifically located in Destination Crenshaw’s new Sankofa Park, which per the artist, “I wanted to expand this question of a struggle for representation, and struggle for human rights and for visible signs of dignity, which is essentially what sculptural monuments are — what we as a collective society stand behind, what we gather around and consider to be our high watermarks as a society.” Destination Crenshaw is the largest public/private Black art program in the U.S., and all of the presented artists have strong ties to Los Angeles. The seven inaugural outdoor sculptures and installations, of which Wiley’s is included, are scheduled to be installed by Fall 2022.

“Destination Crenshaw is a community-led project to revitalize the Crenshaw corridor while creating space for Black people to thrive there—socially, economically, and culturally,” says Jason Foster, the president and COO of the project. “We are grateful to be working with a remarkable first cohort of artists, all with roots in the Crenshaw community, whose commissioned works will strengthen personal connections to the neighborhood and permanently secure the cultural identity of Black Los Angeles."