SAN FRANCISCO: Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley, Benediter Brkou (The World Stage: Israel), 2011. Oil and gold and silver enamel on canvas, 115 x 79 ⅝ in. (framed). Private collection. Image via thecjm.org.

Kehinde Wiley | The World Stage: Israel
February 14–May 27, 2013

CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM
736 Mission Street (Between 3rd and 4th Streets)
San Francisco, CA

The first major exhibition in San Francisco featuring this nationally–known African American artist

The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) presents Kehinde Wiley | The World Stage: Israel, the first major exhibition in San Francisco of African American artist Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977)—one of the most significant young artists working today. Wiley is known for vibrant, large-scale paintings of young, urban, T-shirt clad men of color he encounters on streets around the world and renders in the heroic poses typical of classical European portraiture.

The exhibition is part of the artist’s ambitious and multifaceted series, The World Stage, that has taken him to China, India, Brazil, and beyond, in an exploration of diasporas, identity, cultural hybridity, and power. The eighteen portraits in Kehinde Wiley | The World Stage: Israel depict men of diverse religions and ethnicities influenced by urban culture, who Wiley met in Israel—Ethiopian Jews and Jewish and Arab Israelis. Wiley has placed these subjects against vivid, ornate backgrounds inspired by Jewish textiles and papercuts, and has finished each with a hand-carved wooden frame crowned with emblems borrowed from Jewish decorative tradition.

As part of the exhibition, the CJM is including a selection of historical textiles and works on paper, like those from which Wiley draws inspiration, borrowed from The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley, and the Skirball Museum, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.

Kehinde Wiley

Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Wiley early on encountered the world of classical European portraiture in the galleries of the Huntington Library, which he frequented as part of free weekend art classes his mother enrolled him in when he was eleven years old. The works in the Huntington collection had a profound impact on him. “It was sheer spectacle, and of course beauty. I had no way of digesting it. But at the same time, there was this desire to somehow possess it or belong to it,” says Wiley.

Wiley went on to earn his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1999) and MFA from Yale University (2001) and became an Artist-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. It was in Harlem that Wiley formulated and consolidated his unique vision and approach to portraiture, catalyzed by the daily procession of over-the-top urban fashion and male bravado he witnessed on 125th Street and by a chance encounter with a cast-off piece of paper.

“It was a mug shot of an African American man in his twenties and it made me begin to think about portraiture in a radically different way,” says Wiley. “I began thinking about this mug shot itself as portraiture in a very perverse sense, a type of marking, a recording of one’s place in the world in time. And I began to start thinking about a lot of the portraiture that I had enjoyed from the eighteenth century and noticed the difference between the two: how one is positioned in a way that is totally outside their control, shut down and relegated to those in power, whereas those in the other were positioning themselves in states of stately grace and self-possession.”

It was then that Wiley began to apply the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, history, wealth, and prestige to the representation of a group of people absent from museum walls—urban black and brown men. He emerged on the art scene in 2003 with a series of portraits of young Harlem men staged in grand poses of the European portrait tradition while dressed in the baggy jeans and logo-emblazoned T-shirts so pervasive on the street. In what is now a signature component of his portraits, the subjects vie for visual attention with the vibrant, richly detailed patterns that fill the background and often threaten to overtake the figures.

In order to find appropriate models, Wiley began what he calls “street casting” for black males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, who exhibit a certain type of alpha-male energy and even homoerotic beauty. The men come to his studio where they leaf through illustrated art history books to choose a figure that serves as the model for the pose they want to emulate. They are then photographed in that stance. Their choice of clothing is entirely their own. Wiley uses various views from the photo shoots to create his portraits.

Beginning in 2006, Wiley expanded his vision with his series The World Stage, traveling the globe to explore the black diaspora and the global phenomenon of urban African American youth culture, something he has found to be a powerful and persistent means by which people interact with American culture. His focus has been on countries that he believes are part of the conversation in the twenty-first century. The resulting series of paintings from China, India, Brazil, Senegal, Nigeria, and Israel each uniquely map the models within their native or adopted countries and explore their local culture, incorporating aspects of regional history, traditional patterns and designs, and sly nods to the social and political milieu in which they live. “I wanted to mine where the world is right now,” Wiley explains, “and chart the presence of black and brown people throughout the world.”

Wiley now lives and works between New York and Beijing. His paintings are in the collections of over forty museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, High Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Museum. His work has been the subject of numerous monographs including a comprehensive Rizzoli publication released in 2012.

The Exhibition

For The World Stage: Israel, Wiley scouted for subjects in the discos, malls, bars, and sporting venues of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Lod in 2010. The eighteen portraits in the exhibition present a kaleidoscopic picture of contemporary Israeli diversity, a society at the physical and symbolic intersection of Africa, Europe, and Asia. Wiley’s subjects are from diverse religions and ethnicities—Israeli Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and Israeli Arabs—revealing an Israel that is more ethnically diverse and globally attuned than most people might realize.

Many of Wiley’s models for The World Stage: Israel are Beta Israel—Jews from Ethiopia—whose families immigrated to Israel (made aliyah) in the 1980s and 1990s during Operation Moses and Operation Solomon, two Israeli-sponsored airlifts. A featured figure in several of the paintings is Kalkidan Mashasha, a popular Ethiopian hip-hop musician who has used music as a means of understanding his Ethiopian Jewish Israeli identity and the repression he initially felt in his adopted country.

For this series, Wiley has placed his models against ornate backgrounds inspired by the decorative patterns of Jewish textiles and papercuts, an intricate form of folk and ceremonial art. Wiley chose the designs for their decorative and symbolic impact.

Wiley also designed hand-carved wooden frames crowned with emblems borrowed from the Jewish decorative tradition: the hands of a priest (Kohen) and the Lion of Judah, symbolizing blessing, power, and majesty. Each frame also supports text. For the portraits of Jewish men the Ten Commandments are used. For Arab men, Wiley chose the plea of Rodney King, victim of a police beating that sparked race riots in the artist’s home city of Los Angeles in 1991: “Can we all get along?”

Also on view as part of the exhibition is a selection of historical textiles and works on paper like those from which Wiley has drawn inspiration. The traditional works from the collection of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley and the Skirball Museum, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, include lavishly decorated Torah ark curtains and intricate papercuts.

A short documentary film detailing Wiley’s travel to Israel to create the works in the exhibition is also on view.

Items available in the Museum Store include skateboard decks ($79), dog tag necklaces ($18), and beach towels ($95) featuring select portraits from the exhibition. Limited edition marble busts ($1400-$1600) will also be available as well as catalogs for Wiley’s various World Stage series ($40) and a beautifully illustrated monograph published by Rizzoli in 2012 ($65).

Kehinde Wiley | The World Stage: Israel is organized by the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Major support for this exhibition has been provided by the Columbia Foundation and The Jim Joseph Foundation. Supporting sponsorship has been provided by Siesel Maibach and Eta and Sass Somekh.

The Koret and Taube Foundations are the Lead Supporters of the 2012/13 exhibition season. 

YouTube: Kehinde Wiley | The World Stage: Israel | The Jewish Museum NYC

Exhibit link