I’d been showering in a public swimming pool’s locker room, my eyes closed and my mind wandering, when I was yanked back to reality by the voice of an acquaintance. “So!” she’d said. “Are you excited about the Kehinde Wiley show?”
“No,” I’d said, feeling like a killjoy.
Prior to Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, the new Seattle Art Museum exhibition that originated at the Brooklyn Museum, I had seen Wiley paintings only one at a time, at art fairs, in the occasional group show, or hung in the formal dining room of fictional hiphop mogul Lucious Lyon on TV’s hit drama Empire. In those one-off appearances, I saw a formula repeated over and over: Black artist finds young Black men on the streets, casts them as the kings and nobles in Old Master paintings, and adds mesmerizing flowery, ornate backgrounds.
Bling and virtue. What greater cultural currencies do we have in today’s super-conflicted Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter America? Wiley offers an easy win for both sides. People and institutions at the top of the American capitalist ladder love his paintings…
