Kehinde Wiley Essay

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Kehinde Wiley is a New York portrait painter known for his highly naturalistic paintings of urban African and African-American men in heroic poses. Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California in 1977. Kehinde Mother is African-American and father is from Nigeria. As a young boy Kehinde Wiley mother enrolled him in after school art classes and by the age of 12 which helped and started his love for art creating him into the artist he is today. Kehinde attended an art school in Russia for a short period of time. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from the San Francisco Art Institute and graduated from Yale University School of Art two years later with a Master’s degree in Fine Arts. As years went past Kehinde did not have …show more content…

At the age of 20 Kehinde travelled to Nigeria looking to meet his father and also to explore his roots while there. After meeting his father, Wiley began to painting portraits of his father. Wiley's passion and creativity for art re-write history with the importance on focusing on African American men and women he also brings a different style of art that not a lot of people are aware of. Many thought Wiley was re-writing history because of European artists such as Pablo Picasso in the 1900s he was impacted by African statues and the style of these statues with post-impression styles pretty much how Kehinde Wiley is doing things and also how he connects the African culture with his style of art when expressing himself through art.
Wiley’s art gives a different perspective with race “African American” and inner city citizens through his paintings. Kenhinde Wiley also express …show more content…

As he replaces white faces with those of brown individuals, Wiley additionally replaces the stigmatizing negativity painted over black individuals with lustrous chance. Wiley’s items like Portrait of the three Graces redefine the stereotypes that’s been concentrated on black men. Wiley’s paints them with a softness rather than the stereotype thuggish and malevolent depictions. With these reinterpretations, Kehinde Wiley selected to color black men into positions antecedently control by white men and ladies. Wiley presents a series of pictures that depict black girls in situations of the white subjects of notable paintings. not like his male models of UN agency that would wear urban garments, Wiley’s female models seem in elegant robes designed by Givenchy. For the majority of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, at some stage in America, African American people have been enslaved and thought of as inferior by means of their oppressors they tirelessly labored in plantations in terrible situations and had been denied primary human rights like freedom and schooling. As indicated by the article, “Are Black Women Invisible?”, Melissa Burkley, Ph.D., claims that African-American women “have to overcome the disadvantage of being a member of two underrepresented groups,” being black and being a woman. African-American women have been subject to a constant and tedious struggle with Western

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