Kehinde Wiley’s New Exhibition Is a Chapel for Mourning

When Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition, “An Archaeology of Silence,” opens in the United States on March 18, the most important room some viewers might enter is one with no artwork at all.

The “respite room” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco will be an area where visitors can take a breath and regain their composure after viewing the display of almost billboard-size paintings and huge sculptures of Black men and women in sometimes crumpled positions — struck down, resting, wounded or dead — in settings that reference iconic Western paintings of religious and mythological subjects.