This week brought the unveiling of the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery. Each image is both visually striking and laced with symbolic meaning, as well as imbued with the significance of the nation’s first African American presidential couple having selected African American artists to produce their likenesses. The former first lady tapped Amy Sherald, who employs a stylized realism in her portraits of African American subjects and has relatively recently garnered art world acclaim. For his portrait, Barack Obama selected Kehinde Wiley, who’s known for depicting young black people in portraits that echo earlier traditions of painting.
The art historian and critic Kobena Mercer considered Wiley’s work in an essay included in the tenth and final volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art. While the nine preceding books cover the ways in which mostly European artists have presented people of African descent through history, the tenth turns the series towards the rise of black artists in the twentieth century. In his essay, “New Practices, New Identities: Hybridity and Globalization,” Mercer places Wiley alongside artists like Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Bradford.
Here’s some of Mercer on Wiley:
Joining archival and portraiture thematics, paintings by Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles, California) transport the viewer to the realm of the seventeeth-century European Baroque. In works such as Portrait of Pablillos de Valladolid, Buffon de Phillip IV, II (2005), the second Roman numeral in the title signifies a contemporary doubling of a 1636-1637 portrait by Diego Velázquez. Substituting an African American man adorned in late twentieth-century hyperblack vernacular style for the original figure—in this case, an actor in the Spanish royal court—the artist asks young men on city streets if they would like their portraits painted, and individuals then select a work from a catalogue of canonical portraits. Code-switching black street style with the self-glorification of European noblemen does not aggrandize the former in terms set by the latter but sets off interruptive discrepancies that question the codes through which male power is portrayed. Wiley titled his Passing/Posing exhibition of 2003 after his observation that young black men appropriate the inner-city street as a runway on which to perform identities for an audience. Black male self-fashioning with baggy jeans, branded clothes, ritual handshakes, and body language that struts or limps rather than walks employs the artifice of style to counteract perceptions that black men with limited life choices are powerless. But on the two-way street of Wiley’s portraiture, the posturing driven by self-protective defenses exists on a transcultural continuum with displays of power in Western art history that also relied on deliberately ostentatious performances in the stylized language of clothes. “Ultimately, what I’m doing is jacking history,” the artist says. “I’m emptying out the original. It’s almost a type of drag anyway.”
Mercer goes on to note the ways in which Wiley’s decorative designs—patterned backgrounds like the greenery against which he placed Obama—“isolate his figures in an intensified realm of purely pictorial space” and “reveal vulnerability that macho posing tries to mask.” It’s fascinating to consider the layering involved in Wiley’s having gone from portraits of urban black male youth who’ve adopted “macho posing” to this painting of Obama, who’s famously comported himself in a manner designed to negate the stereotyped expectations of African American manhood with which Wiley’s earlier work plays, and from subjects who’ve employed “the artifice of style” to counter perceptions of their powerlessness to one who’s consciously sought to make others comfortable with his great power.