Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis Art Museum

I N R E V I E W

KEHINDE WILEY: SAINT LOUIS

Kehinde Wiley, arguably best known for his portrait of President Obama, came to St. Louis with the intention of honoring some of our less-celebrated residents. Through February 10, the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) gives space and representation to residents from North St. Louis city and county. Curated by Simon Kelly and Hannah Klemm with research assistant Molly Moog, Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis sets a precedent for who is welcome to institutionalized and museum spaces. Wiley’s larger-than-life portraits exuding radical youth and presenting black bodies just as they overwhelm the spaces where they are hung.

In the 11 portraits that make up the exhibition, Wiley depicts individuals in their everyday garb, as their authentic selves, rendered in his recognizable classical European painting style, surrounded by intricate and ornate decorative elements. When speaking of composition and process, Wiley elaborates on how these images came to be. During a visit to St. Louis in 2017, he purposefully looked for subjects near the convenience store Michael Brown was allegedly stealing from. He stood outside meeting and greeting individuals who had no idea what he was busy planning. Wiley chose models meant to reflect St. Louis and show something of the heterogeneity of its black

residents. Nine of the portraits (the exception is the Portrait of Mahogany Jones and Marcus Stokes) are named in reference to Western European artworks they mirror in pose and style, images of white, aristocrats that Wiley selected from the SLAM collection.

An age-old question around portraiture asks if a still image can capture the subject’s personality or say anything of meaning about that individual. Portraits act as time capsules, sometimes serving to keep the subject young and beautiful for eternity, but also capturing the time and place of their making. By happenstance, two of his portraits featured within the SLAM exhibit feature subjects wearing Nike shirts with the logos prominently displayed. And so, Wiley provides future art historians with thesis material regarding would-be football celebrity Colin Kaepernick's Nike campaign and how the relationship between activism, consumerism, sports culture and 21st-century racism plays out in fashion.

While Wiley’s 11 sitters were encouraged to make their own wardrobe choices, he determined all other aspects of each painting’s composition. Each color scheme was picked to make a statement, sometimes breaking away from contemporary modes of framing black masculinity , other times in referenceto colors of power seen in the portraits of the past. Ornate patterns and floral elements that might

be found on fabrics and wallpaper in the homes of landed gentry cover each canvas, often partially obscuring the figure and skewing the foreground with the background. The effect is like surround sound, making the subjects fight for space, disconnecting the bodies from any sort of place.

Wiley describes oil painting as an art form that has its own “vocabulary of dignity.” To have your likeness painted on canvas, framed and hung on a wall confers distinction. This was true historically, and still holds true today. Wiley’s portrait sitters were invited to see themselves represented on the SLAM museum walls at the opening event for the exhibition on October 19th. Some say that they had not imagined themselves so large. One woman, Lynette Foote, attended a press preview event the day before the official opening and found herself in awe as she looked up at herself, her daughter and another young woman transformed into Three Girls in a Wood. She is, forever, part of our human story, a story that is much richer for Wiley’s illustrations.

www.slam.org

IN REVIEW WINTER 2018/19 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM

-Lauryn Marshall