A Conversation with Kehinde Wiley

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
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Published 2023-03-18
In this conversation with Kehinde Wiley, hear about the Kehinde Wiley exhibition and the artist’s practice. Led by Claudia Schmuckli, curator in charge of contemporary art and programming, this talk explores Wiley’s new body of work that sheds light on the brutalities of American and global colonial pasts.

About the speakers
Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles in 1977 to an African American mother and a Nigerian father. He earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999, and his MFA from Yale University in 2001. Prior to painting Barack Obama’s official presidential portrait, Wiley was already renowned for “street casting” Black sitters from underserved communities and for endowing their portraits with the scale, visual vocabularies, and symbolic rhetoric of Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic “Grand Manner” portraiture. At the unveiling of his portrait of Barack Obama, Wiley declared, “This is consequential, this is who we as a society decide to celebrate. This is our humanity, this is our ability to say: ‘I matter. I was here.’ The ability to be the first African American painter to paint the first African American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming.”

Claudia Schmuckli is curator in charge of contemporary art and programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Previously she was director and chief curator of the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, where she forged a reputation as a pivotal figure in the presentation of contemporary art. Before coming to the Blaffer Art Museum, Schmuckli worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She holds an MA in art history from the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

Learn more about the exhibition: www.famsf.org/exhibitions/kehinde-wiley-an-archaeo…

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All Comments (11)
  • @therockneverstops8261
    Can someone reference the “Black Rock” organization for Black artists to do work in West Africa??? 🙏🏾🙏🏾
  • @DjWrightLicsw
    Impressive. How often will a African American male speake in confrontativeruth in ways to any Anglo. He is correcting this interview and retiring her attempt to impose her thinking on his work and life. Wonderful! Hope more men of color will speak his truth when it needed fearlessly. This is an excellent model and we must ensure his protection spiritually and well in this natural realm. His single mother raised this black man wel. Thank you mom and Kehendi.❤❤❤❤❤