Art Scene In Motion

December 19, 2004STUDIO VISIT
The History of Art, in Baggy Jeans and Bomber JacketsBy MIA FINEMAN
OUT & ABOUT 'Passing/Posing' Kehinde Wiley's show will be at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, through Feb. 5.

ON a recent Wednesday afternoon, the studio on West 23rd Street where Kehinde Wiley lives and works was a maelstrom of activity. Near the door, three art handlers were packing five of his large canvases for shipment, hammering supports and loudly tearing through fat rolls of cellophane tape. The paintings, which were barely dry, were to be shipped that night to the contemporary-art fair Art Basel Miami Beach, where they would be installed in the booth of Mr. Wiley's New York dealer, Jeffrey Deitch.
Several young assistants breezed in and out of the studio, talking on cellphones about travel arrangements and trying not to collide with the packers. A couple of cleaning women in white uniforms stepped gingerly around the large potted palms and the half-finished canvases leaned against the walls, collecting abandoned coffee cups and emptying trash cans. The artist's two Italian greyhounds - a breed he first noticed in late-Renaissance portraits of Italian noblemen - scurried across the hardwood floor on toothpicklike legs, vying for attention.
At the center of the commotion sat Mr. Wiley, an amiable man with a round face and a sturdy, compact frame. Leaning forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, he tried to focus on his interview. "Sorry things are so crazy today," he said, then laughed. "Actually, it's like this pretty much every day."
Just three years out of art school, Mr. Wiley has achieved the kind of meteoric success that most young artists only dream about. He is represented by major galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. His shows have been covered by the art press, as well as by mass-circulation magazines like Vibe, Vogue and Essence. His work has already found its way into several museum collections, as well as into the mansions of celebrities like Russell Simmons, Elton John and Denzel Washington." If you want to buy one of his newest paintings, which sell for up to $20,000, you'll have to put your name on a waiting list.
Now, at 27, he's having his first solo museum show, "Passing/Posing," at the Brooklyn Museum through Feb. 5. The exhibition features 18 large-scale paintings, all depicting young black men in urban street clothes - sports-team jerseys, hoodies, baseball caps, baggy jeans, puffy jackets - floating in front of lushly colored decorative backgrounds. In the back room is a chapel-like installation, first shown at last year's Miami Beach Basel art fair, which includes four cupola-shaped paintings and an enormous ceiling panel that the Brooklyn Museum recently bought for its permanent collection.
Still dressed in his work clothes - a paint-encrusted "wife-beater" tank top and cotton shorts, which serve as wearable rags for wiping off his brushes - Mr. Wiley described his process. His models are young men whom he approaches on the streets of Harlem, Los Angeles and Detroit, inviting them back to his studio. "Having an attractive woman with me helps," he added with a laugh. (He also pays them for their time: $100 an hour.)
Together, they leaf through art history books - usually monographs on old masters like Tiepolo, Titian, Ingres or Raphael. The subject selects a pose from one of the paintings, which he imitates while Mr. Wiley photographs him. "I've seen people choose small figures in large paintings, not even the stars of the show," he said, "and I've seen people who directly want to see themselves as Christ in heaven."
Later, using his photographs for reference, the artist paints the figure, adding background threaded with ornamental patterns derived from a variety of sources, including Celtic manuscript illumination, Islamic metalwork, and Baroque and Rococo architectural designs. Sometimes he transforms the ornate filigree patterns into a sea of stylized spermatazoa, which he renders in gold or platinum - a sly reference to the hyper-masculine posturing of hip-hop culture.
Mr. Wiley was born and raised in south central Los Angeles. When he was 11, his mother, a linguist, enrolled him in an art program that supplemented weekly studio classes with visits to local museums. At the Huntington Library galleries, he was particularly drawn to portraits by the 18th-century British painters Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds.
"They were so artificial and opulent," he said. "There was this strange otherworldiness that, as a black kid from Los Angeles, I had no manageable way of digesting. But at the same time, there was this desire to somehow possess that or belong to that."
After getting his bachelor's degree at the San Francisco Art Institute, he went on to the graduate program at the Yale University School of Art. There, he came up against his instructors' expectations that his work would deal explicitly with the politics of black identity. "There was this overwhelming sense of, 'O.K., Kehinde, where's your Negro statement?' " he recalled.
His response was to paint a series of ironic images of watermelons in the style of Magritte or de Chirico. These works are now installed in the back of Mr. Wiley's closet. "While they're not some of the most sophisticated or beautiful paintings I've made," he said, "they're some of my favorites because they remind me of a point in my life that felt absolutely desperate and lost and powerless. I don't want to romanticize that too much, but it's interesting to look at."
It was in 2001, when he was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, that Mr. Wiley hit upon his current melding of late-Renaissance prototypes and hip-hop street style. "With the work I'm doing now, I'm interested in history as it relates to bling-bling," he said in an interview with Christine Y. Kim, a curator at the Studio Museum. "In places like Harlem, people ornament their bodies, love Gucci and Versace ... I'm interested in certain types of French Rococo ornament that end up as faux décor in shopping malls or in Michael Graves's faux neo-classicism, for that matter."
Ms. Kim sees Mr. Wiley's style in relation to the work of his contemporaries, like Yinka Shonibare, a British artist of Nigerian descent who reinterpreted Fragonard's "Swing" (1767) using African textiles. "They're taking elements from two very distinct, divergent histories and cross-referencing the image and iconography to create an explosive and compelling collusion of histories and ideas," she said in a telephone interview.
It's not difficult to understand why Mr. Wiley's work would appeal to curators and collectors of contemporary art. His paintings are big and bold, and the colors are exquisitely rich; their iconography is hip, savvy and spiked with references to the European high-art tradition.
But this artist is also eager to reach a more general audience. "I want my work to look as familiar to young kids as it is to seasoned art historians who know all the references," he said. "What appeals to me about painting is something that has cultural fluency."
Another undeniable aspect of Mr. Wiley's appeal has to do with his penchant for showmanship. For the opening of his show in Brooklyn, he hired a drag queen trained in Italian opera, sporting a wig and Venetian-style ball gown and backed by a string quartet in black tie, to perform a version of the Kelis song "Milkshake." This was followed by an extravagant banquet at Grand Prospect Hall, a Victorian-era ballroom in Park Slope.
"He knows how to make life big," said Mr. Deitch, known for his high-octane, youth-oriented gallery program. For his next show at Deitch Projects, "Rumors of War," Mr. Wiley plans to create a series of large-scale equestrian portraits, using live horses as models.
"We'll probably have to hire stunt doubles for some of the poses," he mused. He has also commissioned a composer to transpose hip-hop songs to be played by an all-black military brass band and has applied for a permit to hold an opening-night parade somewhere in Manhattan.
Mr. Wiley's new paintings made it safely to the Miami Beach Basel art fair, and after a brief detour to go fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, so did Mr. Wiley - with 100 pounds of fish in tow. "He found the hottest restaurateur in town to cook up all the fish and threw a huge banquet for all his friends," Mr. Deitch said. "It was the most fun thing going on in Miami Beach on Sunday night."
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