Good evening everyone and welcome. I'm Brent Benjamin, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. [Applause] That's lovely and not necessary. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Museum this evening and introduce our distinguished speaker Kehinde Wiley. In addition to our audience here in the Farrell Auditorium I would also like to welcome those watching our live broadcast online and in the Museum's Education Center. Thank you all for joining us.
and in the Museum's Education Center. Thank you all for joining us. The occasion for this evening's lecture is the opening of the exhibition, Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis The exhibition is deeply connected to Saint Louis and informed by visits that Mr. Wiley made to St. Louis in 2017. During which, he invited individuals he met in neighborhoods in North St. Louis and Ferguson to pose for his paintings. Wiley then recast works of art, selected from the Museum's collection, using these local models. We welcome this evening several of our fellow St. Louisans who modeled for these portraits and we thank you for putting yourself on display in the Museum. [Applause] Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles and earned his BFA from San Franciso Art Institute and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art. Wiley was honored in 2015 by the U.S. Department of State with a Medal of Arts award, celebrating his commitment to cultural diplomacy through the visual arts. In February 2018, and as we all know, Wiley's portrait of President Barack Obama
In February 2018, and as we all know, Wiley's portrait of President Barack Obama was added to the permanent installation of presidential portraits in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. [Applause] And just last week, Wiley was awarded the W. E. B. Dubois Medal presented by Harvard University in recognition of his contribution to African and African American culture. This is Harvard's highest honor in the field of African and African American studies. Wiley's work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem and has been the subject of ten monographs to date. Generous support for the exhibition and related public programs has been provided by a grant from the Trio Foundation of St. Louis which works to advance creativity and equality of opportunity in our region. The exhibition is also supported with a gift from Mary Ann and Andy Srenco. Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis is on view in Galleries 249 and 250 in the East Building until February 10, 2019. We hope this evening's talk will offer insights into Kehinde Wiley's work and his unique contributions to the history of portraiture. Now I hope you will please join me in welcoming to our stage, Kehinde Wiley. [Applause] Good evening. Thank you guys so much for coming out. I can't tell you what a huge honor this is and what abiding pleasure it is to be able to see people of all stripes and ages from north and south coming around to look at something so primal this, this urge to create something out of nothing, to create images in oil. Oil painting is something that is central to Western European culture. It's central to a vocabulary of dignity. There's something about oil painting that I fell in love with as a kid and I hope tonight to be able to give you a little sense of what it means to me uh, what this show here at the Saint Louis Museum uh, means as well. Let's, let's get started. This is uh, little different. This is an image that I made when I was a graduate student at Yale and and what you'll see in this picture is an examination of color, certainly. But also an examination of black masculinity. I was thinking here about a lot of things but certainly about strength the way that it's been depicted in a historical sense. If we think about hair, this kind of impossibly large afro. This painting hearkens back to I don't know, maybe even like a Samsonian sense of strength. What I was trying to do back in those days was to boil down some of the issues that I was concerned with into imagemaking. There's a reason why the shoulder blurs, he's sort of, he's sort of uncomfortable with himself. There's something to be said about creating a type of picture that is about fullness and about self-possession, but also a little bit discomfort. That sense of not being fully in your own skin. All of my work has been informed by a passion for the history of art. Since I was a kid, I've been studying painting, easily, arguably from the age of 11. My mother sent me to art school when I was around 11 years old Me and my twin brother were sent off to art school as a means of getting out of the streets of South Central Los Angeles. You know, back in the 80s, that was sort of the thing to do, I guess. You know, finding some educational path. Tonight, I'd like to give honor to my mother who's here in the room tonight. [Applause] I say that as a means of you know laying, laying the record straight with regards to where my power comes from. with regards to where my instincts come from. I stand on the shoulders of so many people who came before me, from artists to people who encouraged me in small ways. I think it's really important to be able to not only take satisfaction in the fact that I'm able to stand here before you and make certain moves forward, but also to look back at the history of art, at the history of those who surround me, all of those beautiful faces that inspired me to feel like things were possible. Without belaboring this matter, I'm going to talk a little bit about kinsmanship and about the people that you are with. Now every artist learns from others and I was easily influenced as a kid when I was going to those schools by some of the 17th and 18th century British portrait painters. I remember going to this, the Huntington Library and Gardens and seeing some of those, the most amazing paintings there and thinking somehow I want to be able to participate in the conversation that's going on there. The trouble is that when I was going to those museums I was looking at images of landed gentry and amazing powdered wigs and pearls and lap dogs and, you know, there's just no way to get in. It felt as though there was a type of remove and that sense of alienation that I felt in those paintings or that sense of alienation that I had at that moment was something that was easily overcome by my passion for painting just the idea that I could somehow get close to making marks like that. So I just tried, I just kept on pushing myself to, to to advance in that direction. Later paintings would take on that same totemic sense of this impossible afro. But now, it is going into this strangely, sort of phallic place? [Laughter] The hair is at once a sign of masculinity but it's also undermining the masculinity that it talks about. The hair is a sign of individuality but it's also something that is joining these two individuals who happen to be the same individual. The model is repeated twice. The twinning aspect is the same twinning that is something I'm so familiar with. My twin brother is here tonight. There's this sense of, like, being a twin that is crucial to the DNA of my work, that sense of looking at someone who has grown up at the same time with you, at the same key, crucial moments of development Twinning in this work has to do with that real question of who am I. When I look at myself, do I see myself reflected in this picture or quite possibly, in a broader way. The broader way in this picture has to do with the color sensibility that you see in the picture. All of these colors are pointing quite directly to a kind of a cervic pink a type of a color palette that you'd find more in Boucher painting or a Fragonard. I don't want to bore you with art history but there is, there was a moment where things got really pink in Europe. [Laughter] And that pink sensibility was actually strangely in accordance to a type of masculinity that was being spoken about. People who had the power to commission the greatest artists of their time would commission their portraits in this type of effete over the top, drawn sense of what pink could be. Color plays a very important role in the way that we think of things. In this picture, you'll see that there is that same over-the-top hair that grows out, that spills out into the form There's a sense of business formal, but at that same moment, this is the painting that I was making in my last year at Yale I was obsessed with the way that color exists within culture. We think about fast food restaurants and we think about, oh I don't know, McDonalds and fast food. We think about the colors of orange, maybe red. We certainly don't think about greens and blues. Food culture is coded for color. Class is coded for color. This happens to be Martha Stewart's 1999 home collection, Sea Foam Green. [Laughter] That sense of status anxiety was something that I was highly influenced and interested in. It was a question of how you can take those small moments that exist within culture and fold them into what paintings can mean. I left Yale, went to New York and I had no visible means or possible means of surviving until I got the Artist-in-Residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. They accept three artists every year and I happened to be one of the lucky artists who could finally have a space to work and some small stipend to buy paint and a studio. And while I was there, I wanted to kind of clear, clear the table and and think about things a bit differently. I was looking at New York from a whole different point of view I'm a kid from Los Angeles, California where people don't populate the streets as much as they do in New York. I remember being in New York and being dazzled by that Saturday afternoon where people were walking down the street and peacock-ing and being extraordinarily blown away by the sheer presence of blackness in Harlem in the early 2000s One of those days I was walking down the street and I found this piece of paper that was in the street and it happened to be this mugshot profile that it kind of changed my sense of what was possible. I was thinking about this picture that I saw in the profile But I was also thinking about the picture as a portrait. This is a type of portraiture. It's a sad type of portraiture, but it is, in fact, a type. I started working with that image and I I didn't just start working with that moment of chance I started being obsessed with chance itself. I started being obsessed with this idea that had I not been walking down the street at that particular moment that moment would not have happened and this entire enterprise wouldn't be here. I started painting this picture and thinking about removing the background because there was none. There was just this white field and this young man whose story we don't know. There's certain clues. There's beads that point to certain cultural moments. But the mugshot is a type of portraiture in the end. It's about reducing the body to full-frontal oftentimes side, a type of display. So much of my work has been about taking the portrait and introducing choice into it. The choice that exists within so much of Western European art has to do with landed gentry those who have the means to hire the greatest artists of their generation to paint pictures of them for all time indelibly into museum space, into personal collection space into the most exquisite depiction of how they are at their most youthful and beautiful. You know, this is uh, this is tough stuff what happens to someone like myself who feels at once alienated from that tradition and drawn to it. Do you throw away the baby in the bathwater? Or do you find a way to work within the tradition and find space for yourself. What I wanted to do was create a space where the black masculinity that I occupy, the body that I occupy can be seen perhaps not in the same two-dimensional light that I had often seen on television and popular culture. There was a strange difference between who I am and what I was seeing in the world. I remember thinking about the joy that I see when I, that I have when I see friends and family and the lack of joy that I see in the depictions of black men in popular culture. There's a project that I wanted to create that basically went to the heart of that. I got a number of individuals to smile for an hour. [Laughter] You'll find that they're all at different points of that smile [laughter] One's at ten minutes. One's just starting. One's at the end of that hour. It's a video performance that is both kind of mesmerizing and heartbreaking and it's uh, one of those pieces that points to my practice in painting, but also the practice that goes outside of it. All of these young men were people who I met, back in, I believe, 2001, when I first came to New York. And I wanted to, I wanted to take that moment of chance, that same moment when I was finding myself and trying to figure out my life. That same moment when I was finding that mugshot photo in the street. That same sense of radical chance. I wanted to forward that conversation. I began going into the streets and actually talking to people asking them, will you imagine being in one of these paintings. imagine seeing yourself on, uh, a narrative scale. I had to sort of evolve over time a way of talking to people in the streets. I had to figure out how to convince people to to come to my studio without thinking that I was like a total creep. [Laughter] So what happens is you start bringing books. You start bringing friends who give you credibility. You start talking about essentially the terms of the work. And what the terms of the work is is that there's a history of art and I'm curious about it. And I'm curious about your interpretation, extrapolation of what we where we are. I'm curious about what you'll choose to wear the day of the shoot. My process is to go out into the streets and find complete strangers and ask them to come model for me. But then, uh, go through art history books. In these bodies of work, I'm actually looking at some of the most powerful individuals in western Europe. And looking at the way that they choose to position their bodies. This pose was like the height of masculinity.
to position their bodies. This pose was like the height of masculinity. back during the 16th century. Um, there's something to be said about the transformation act of taking a moment in America's present tense in its urban areas and uh, black communities and to superimpose that on something such as the Prophet and the King. That same pose, that same moment, that same urge. This was in an exhibition that I did at the Columbus Museum. And it was the first, uh, the first real chance that I had to think about America in a way that looked at an institution, as well as a community. The work was designed to draw lines of corollary between museum space so you're looking that sort of frocked wallpaper and the language of museum culture. You're looking at large-scale painting and the scale is decidedly important. In this body of work, there's a slight turn. There's a desire to see the opposite of the sort of proud, profound figure. In this body of work, I'm actually looking at the fallen. Looking at moments in which the opposite of the self-possessed uh, figure comes into play. The Dead Soldier of 2007 begins a conversation that really tries to push the envelope of what's possible. In terms of decay, death, and self-presentation. The source material starts with historical works that reference death and decay and morbidity. But I suppose I was drawn to this material because death and decay and morbidity are something that is inherent with the aesthetic of nomads. There is inherent within any society or any group of people that have to overcome so many hurdles generationally that you improvise new solutions. And so this body of work takes that sort of downtrodden, down-laid narrative and sort of becomes infused with a type of life in the midst of that death, rot, and decay. This sense of street-casting, again, using that same narrative of the chance and the moment and the American street. But also, introducing a little bit of light at the end of that tunnel. These paintings are decidely, uh religious in some ways. The light that you see in these paintings is drawing almost directly from the Venetian school I was thinking quite specifically about Tiepolo's ceiling frescoes and about the way that light drawn across the human body is a signifier for divinity itself. The idea of the body being drawn up into the heavens this type of apotheosis the way that an artist uses light on flesh being a commentary on how he feels about the subjects themselves. So when you look at my work and you think about that colored light always think about the way that rapture is the subject matter in the room. Always think about the fact that as light draws itself across the body the body is being seen as both sacred and profane, profane and sacred, the permanent and the temporary. One of the reason's why portraiture again has been done for all time has to do with permanence. And permanence has historically been about oil on canvas, museum, private space and insuring that your body is seen for all time in proper measure. For that reason, so many of these grand portraits have been portrayed in really large scale. If you go to the Louvre and see some of the great historical works that I'm inspired by you'll see that these paintings are massive. They contend with you three-dimensionally almost as though they're bodies themselves. I wanted to be able to participate in that conversation. There's a reason why this painting is on that scale There's a reason why the way that we think about this painting as being something that pulls the human attention has much less to do with scale, sadly, than race. The conversation that I had historically around scale was around those artists who proffered on an idea of fixed vocabularies. Fixed vocabulary for a chosen few, an inside crew When changing the body inside of those paintings, when swatching that out for black American bodies the conversation becomes very different. This conversation around a dead Christ feels very different, even today in 2018 when we start imagining what's been visually present in terms of black bodies in American streets. There's a process to this and that process is to go into not only the visual culture of times before but also to use decorative components from the times before. You'll see that there's oftentimes flowers that sort of insist themselves in paintings. There's a reason for that. There's oftentimes a desire to take a specific moment in time whether it be from the 17th century and allow the decorative traditions from the 17th century to wash across the backstage of those paintings. All of these ideas is to sort of populate the back of a painting with a sheer feeling of the time period. The process is also to literally take the model into the position that the original painting was based on so this guy was like created out of putting muslin down pouring water onto the muslin and creating that painting. So it's a, it's a work of, of real sacrifice. Equestrian portraiture is something that I got into when I was thinking about the second Gulf War. Around that time, what was it, 2006, 2007, I was looking at the specter of war and thinking about the way that war has been depicted in paintings. And when you think about the history of paintings, there's a certain language that's evolved over time. There's a certain vocabulary to violence. At the core of that vocabulary is is equestrian painting, equestrian military painting. What I decided here was to create real reproductions of those moments of dynamism and theatricality. But also to really go into the process of it. I went into museums and tried to find specific examples of equestrian portraits in which powerful military and political leaders were horse-mounted in western easel painting. Here you'll see that the original painting has a lot of bearing based on the original. There's a couple of things that have been switched out and the thing about this is that I'm actually really really excited about the fact that this is art made in the 21st century. Most of my models are photographed first uh, I work almost exclusively from photograph given that, it's next to impossible to get anyone to pose these days. But also, I work exclusively from photograph because there's an ability to
But also, I work exclusively from photograph because there's an ability to heighten and diminish certain colors the ability to manipulate the image and for us, really, I mean as artists we have to think about what is actual. Is it the photograph that's actual? Is it the desire to create some sort of story that's actual? It's the computer that sort of allows you to get in there and push and pull an image into something that's not quite the beginning object, the starting point Uh, no, not that one, but rather that one It's not quite the beginning object but it's something else. It's not the second, it's the third. and that third is something that's never existed. I say all this to say this to that the bombasity and the pomp that you see in these paintings is nothing new. Yeah, I mean, there's something really cool about sitting about there like that. [Laughter] We have to imagine that during the time of Velázquez and van Dyck these were quite possibly some of the heady days of painting when people could take some of those great leaps in terms of, you know, how deep is your love with regards to ego. I want to go into painting and like and show myself as like fully possessed. Oftentimes, people look at my paintings and they say, you know, come on. You're going a little over the top with the flexing, but I didn't invent this stuff. There are certain paintings that, um, I adore and this is one of them. This is called Chancellor Seguier on Horseback and it depicts a complete promenade of people surrounding a leader with umbrellas but it's also about looking. It's about who's looking at whom and who's looking at you consequentially as well. In much of western European art, the ability for you to feel comfortable while looking at a subject is the subject. When you look at powerful landed gentry which is code for rich, white men you see them often in these classic old paintings looking confidently directly at you the viewer. And it's an amazing tradition. It's an amazing tradition that almost mirrors this young man who's sitting up top on the horse. This ability, sort of like, look at you as equals. Well, in fact, in this case, you're not seen as equal because from point of view, his eyeline is looking down at you, This is nothing new. You'll find that there is a historical corollary to all of this and this is the perfect example of how history can create some amazing examples that can be at once used and thrown away. I think that I've got an attraction to this type of painting but I also think that I'm quite critical of this type of painting. The job of an artist is to take those twin desires and to create something with them. The trouble is that everyone was lying at the time. The ratio of man to horse is very different. I went so far as to find real horses. and it turns out people look a lot smaller on them. [Laughter] So right back to photoshop This is actually the ratio that people wanted to see back during that time. And it's, it's designed for domination. It's a language designed to make the sitter feel as though he can ride this steed and control it with a pinky, control it with the sheer will of his mind. It's a propaganda act. Art has always been at the service of the church, the state, the sitter. And in this particular work, Napoleon Crossing the Alps by David we probably see it at it's most profane. There was a moment when this painting was in a private collection, but it was then acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, where years ago Michael Jackson was doing a video shoot there, and he saw the painting and he wanted to have one too. [Laughter] Up and to that point, so much of my work was about my story, and you know meeting people by chance and sort of this doing this elevation act. But, you know, when Michael Jackson's calling you make some, some changes. [Laughter] The trouble was I didn't really think it was he and so you know I ignored the call and after a number of days people called me who I trust and said, "Dude, like, pick up the phone Michael Jackson's calling." And so I did. This was actually the outcome of that conversation This is the last commissioned portrait of Michael Jackson before his death. Michael and I had a number of conversations back and forth over months sending art history books back and forth. His obsession, I think, was with getting something that was memorial. My obsession was in trying to figure out how to depict someone outside of the standard way of depicting the powerful. He also wanted to talk about something he had built, which is this impossible fame. He spoke quite readily about armor and how armor is at once something that holds the world out, but holds something in. In the end, I ended up going with a certain specific historical reference. I think you'll be able to see the resonance here. So pop culture is something that I don't know, I almost feel as though there's this weird ivory tower dynamic in contemporary art, where artists feel as though they can't participate within certain conversations because to do so would be frowned upon. So much of my work has to do with people who occupy a very living and evolving actuality. The 21st century has no time for all of that. We are in popular culture in as much as we are artists and as much as we are any of us. And so I wanted to be to be able to create work that embraced both Michael Jackson and art history. To embrace African football players from Emmanuel Eboué to Samuel Eto'o to the unity portraits or perhaps even bringing that conversation further in into West African itself. This is some of the first work that I was doing in Senegal. Leaving America and starting to work outside of New York. Working outside of American America's vernacular and exploring Africa and African identity. All of the patterns here leave that question of western Europe behind and start to introduce all of those patterns that I see in the streets of Lagos, Nigeria and the streets of Dakar, Senegal. Finding models from the streets again from the marketplace to soccer fields going into Nigeria taking preexisting public sculptures that are at the core of city centers and having models take on those poses becoming new paintings and becoming a new way of imagining a type of free standing African vision. Many of these images are actually coming from traditional West African sources You'll see that the sort of, Dogon couple, for example is something that exists pre-colonially pre-colonially but is resourced here in the same way that I was resourcing traditional European poses for my painting. Here in Brazil I was going into the city centers in São Paulo. I was going to the favelas and looking at the public sculptures from all of those works that young people look at all over the place and imagining themselves sort of repositioned in that history. Brazil is one of a series of locations that I went to to try to get to terms with this question of globalization. What does the world look like on a global scale and how could we as artists start to create a vocabulary or a narrative surrounding the broader evolution of global culture. The Brazil paintings opportuned a means by which to look at Portuguese and Spanish presence in South America. But it only served to sort of heighten my interest in traveling even further. I went onto India and started looking at romantic notions of the Orient and how Europe was looking at the Orient as a repository for it's desires. I went into Mumbai for example and started finding models in the streets, into New Delhi into Colombo, Sri Lanka and repositioning young people wearing the same clothes that they were wearing the moment that I met them but repositioning within these types of romantic, syrupy paintings surrounding the narrative of India Asia, Asia-minor. So it's, it's the same conversation but it's starting to evolve into different spaces globally and it's starting to complicate itself and to become, sort of reasonably self-paranoiac. Some of the work that I did led me outside of India and, in this specific case, into Tel Aviv. You're looking at Kalkidan Mashasha, who was one of the key Hip-Hop emcees coming out of Israel. The Falasha Jews, the Ethiopian Jews who have a long and proud tradition were invited to repatriate into Israel back in 19, in the 1970s during something called Operation Moses. There are some issues with regards to race all over the place, and certainly in Israel, as well as the United States. And it's interesting to hear young people, such as Kalkidan Mashasha, talking about how he fashioned his identity and his music, how he introduced me to his community of friends who then became the subjects of my work using the decorative traditions of, of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, later displayed at the Jewish Museum in New York City. To be able not only to look at the Ethiopian Jews, but to look even further, to go into basketball courts and dance clubs in Jerusalem and to find Mizrahi Jews and Arab Israelis who later became part of the project that we're talking about. It starts in the black American street but soon this black kid from South Central finds himself way over into the other side of town dealing with some really extraordinary histories. What we have here is the confluence of a portrait that I took at night club but also a tradition that comes from Israeli papercuts. These are papercuts that are devotional. These are religious papercuts. These are things that people create on the occasion of marriages, on the occasion of deaths on the occasions of graduations, any of those liminal moments in your life. But they're made out of paper or made out of fabric because you can hang them on the wall and if you need to move, you bring it with you. Again, this is the aesthetic of nomads. This is that way of picking yourself up and creating something new. The Terra firma is not out there it's in here. Further examples of that would be a painting such as this which come directly from that same tradition. Another papercut background, another subject found through the series of young musicians from the Ethiopian Jewish community in Tel Aviv. I was doing a lot of research, trying to figure out where to find some of the most powerful images or or some of the most powerful backgrounds for these paintings and I found them in some libraries and started reproducing them and working on them in my studio. And it turns out that much of them were actually in the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum in New York right up the street. So, when I had the opportunity to display these paintings I actually had the opportunity also to have the originals laid out in front of the paintings as they were displayed. My work next took me to Here's pictured Barthélémy Toguo who's a contemporary artist who comes from Cameroon who was one of the people who helped me as I traveled through Africa looking at textiles, trying to find those fabrics that become the backgrounds for my paintings and, consequentially, my clothes. [Laughter] Again, I'm taking the, in this particular body of work I'm looking at France I'm looking at French colonial presence in Africa and I'm looking at the ways in which the French footprint could be explored in my paintings. So we're looking at the fabrics that I can find in different cities I'm looking at models that I can find and in this case, I believe I was in Gabon. I went from Morocco to Tunisia to Congo to Gabon, to Cameroon and then back through Senegal possibly about six French colonial territories to chart this process. This pose, while it may be effete, was once the height of masculinity. This notion of taking an old French painting and counter, and introducing a black body into that space taking the old colonial power and introducing West African textiles into that space and reducing all of the backgrounds to sort of a flat void, if you will is the goal. From sub-Saharan black Africa on into Tunisia and north Africa Here you've got identical twins who were the subjects of a one of the paintings that would be coming out of that same World Stage Africa process. And then, you have the work. Again from, northern, northern Africa on into sub-Saharan Africa. The look, the feel, the presence of young people trying to figure out what they look like, how they want to fashion themselves is the urge here, but it's also about that interplay between the artist and the sitter. One of the most fascinating things in art is to realize that artists who are portraitists are, sure, painting someone else, but they're also painting or depicting the interplay between themselves and someone else. One of my favorite artists, Mickalene Thomas, who happens to be here tonight. Mickalene, can you stand? [Applause] is easily the master of that dynamic. that sense in which the artist looks at excuse me, the sitter looks you and says Is this what you want? Is this what you want? Is this what you want? Ya'll know what I'm taking about, those of you who were in some of these paintings upstairs. There's this, there's this sense in which I don't know how you say it, my job is is, sure, to get the likeness down. But the job is also to get the discomfort down or the strangeness down or the improbability of this moment down. All of it is radically unsettling and pleasing at once. The process has always been about creating unity between different different goals as an artist. The goal to explore identity which is something that is at once personal and alien. The goal to go out into the world and portray the other which is at once not myself and sort of myself because I'm the one looking. And it's also a means of creating self-portraiture, strangely. Who's doing all the looking? Who's doing all the pointing? This question surrounding the self came into direct cross-hairs when thinking about gender. Thinking about the presence of women in paintings and the historical means by which women have been appropriated and consumed and subsumed in western easel painting. [Cough] In Jamaica, I went into dance hall culture I literally went into the streets of Jamaica from [cough] excuse me, I have a little bit of a tickle Oh, ya'll coughing too. [Laughter]
Oh, ya'll coughing too. [Laughter] Jamaica was um There's something unique about it, in the sense that there's a direct one to one conversation with America Northern American, I should say, and its music culture and the ways that dance culture has evolved. When you get down there, when you first get to the dance halls you'll realize that there are huge shoulder-mounted cameras everywhere and people are performing for that camera I was down [cough] trying to find models for my paintings [music] and this was just like going on on the side periphery. This wasn't even like a big, like special performance thing, this was just like, ok, like a couple friends hanging out It gives you a sense of context for the sense of joy that exists and the sense of self-discovery, play. This body of work that came out of Jamaica was also about specific poses from the colonial presence in Jamaica. Again, this is going back to some of these questions surrounding how does an artist going into the world find a new piece of it find himself lost and try to find himself in any measure. I don't think it's ever possible to fully get the answer correctly I don't think it's ever possible to tell the fullness of any story, anywhere. But stepping into Jamaica, stepping into dance hall culture will definitely give you that sense of the bombastic and that sense of radical self-possession. Here, there is no sense of staring away from the viewer. The viewer is engaged. In Haiti, I created a a competition, a type of faux-beauty pageant in which there was no judges, no real rules I got on the radio and I got on television and I said, if you believe you are the face of Haiti, if you're smart enough and self-possessed enough to become the face of Haiti show up for the competition to be the face of Haiti on such and such day. So we created this sort of faux pageant that mentioned nothing around the physical, but it was more around this sort of provocation around presence. So The World Stage was the name of the project World Stage Jamaica, World Stage Israel World Stage Haitim in this particular case and we had to come up with a series of prizes. So we would create artificial prizes, just to sort of like play up on this notion of it being a competition. The World Stage Haiti was these are one of the winners. The trouble is, everyone who's in the show was a winner and so we ended up an amazing series of paintings and images that were based upon old again, French and Portuguese images that were in, of landed gentry engaged within the island of Hispaniola during that time. You'll see that it's a process of lot of work and a lot of care to get it right, but it's also a process of learning. Each new space gives you an excuse to explore new aspects of what's possible visually, each new space gives you an ability to explore what's possible decoratively. The, the work that comes out of Haiti is about a beauty pageant that never happened. It's about the building of a castle that was never built. But the art itself occupies the rooms. How do you create work that is that exists in direct consequence to your desire to tear down certain fantasies. A few years ago I partnered with Riccardo Tisci who created these amazing gowns. These are sort of one-of-a-kind couture gowns for a show that was based upon paintings in the Louvre. This show I wanted to sort of create a conversation surrounding that same question about the gaze g-a-z-e, not g-a-y-s. [Laughter] And about the sort of confrontation of the viewer. How does this sitter feel versus those other nude sitters that you've seen in so many of the salon pictures coming out of Europe. How does this picture feel versus those who you've seen in other classic, religious or other Hellenistic pictures coming out of Europe. I allowed for each model to sort of go through different poses and to choose how they wanted to be depicted. I created both small scale and large scale, over the top pictures of women in both white, sort of pure images and dark in quotations, unpure notions of, of, of dress. But you'll see, this is the birth of this sort of field in decay. Alongside that body of work there was some of my sculptural work that I think was gets very little attention. Here there's a sculpture in which the celebration of hair culture in black America starts to become something that goes almost back to some of those first paintings that I showed you. Where the twinning and that sort of joining of the self comes into play. Here, it starts to sort of wrap itself into itself and become either either, a trap or a source of freedom. I suppose that's for the viewer to decide but it's ultimately entitled, "Bound." Hans Memling inspired some of my smaller works After awhile, I sort of got tired of doing massive, over-the-top, chest-beating work but, you know, you have to, you have to realize that there was, there was reason why those works are important. To go into the Louvre and to look at those, that scale is is to behold the, the behold a billboard, to behold someone trying to convince you of their power five hundred years ago. Before all of the moving images that we have in the 21st century. In some of these more diminutive pieces, it looks large here, but it's the size of this computer screen. These pieces are made on wood and they're really quiet. They're made with a single brush. They're made as these little cabinets of curiosity that you open up and discover. They're each crafted with gold, gilding, so that you sort of experience them in a very personal way. They're almost like religious experiences designed to be seen with very soft lighting as though you were sort of bowing in a Catholic church. Back when I was around 12 years old, I think my mom found a project called the Center for U.S. and U.S.S.R. initiatives. And while we didn't have the money to fly off and do fancy international trips this trip was sponsored by Michael Milken And we went off to, me and 50 other American kids, in 1989 it was called the U.S.S.R. and we went to study art in the forest of St. Petersburg. Well, then it was called Leningrad. And, I was invited to go see What was it? St. Peters? Yeah. St. Peter's Square. It'll come to me. But there were some amazing Russian iconic paintings that were completely gold-gilded and to this day, they stick with me. I created an entire body of work that were inspired by them. They were quite possible the same scale small, but architectonic in the same way except in this case, you're actually painting directly on gold leaf itself. It's on a scale that's so small you literally have to sort of paint in your lap and all of this. But it gives you that sense, that sense of the Memlings, that diminutive small, petite scale, but this time the level of religiousity is sort of charged up. Here we're dealing with sheer gold the light bouncing off of the space. All painting is about light. No matter what it is, whether it be a bottle of water or an egg. If I'm trying to paint it, it's about how light bounces off it and bounces into my eye. And so, to be able to work with something that's pure gold, that refracts light in that way it really does have this kind of dynamic appeal. So you can understand why my next pursuit would be stained glass. My abiding passion has to do with understanding how one decision can lead to another aestheically. And I hope that you see tonight that there is a, a reason or a method to the madness that surround the way that these black bodies glow. To go back to that conversation about Tiepolo and the Venetial ceiling frescos bodies glowing in direct reference to religious light has as much to do with the sacred as it does to the profane. It's not a religious conversation it's a social conversation How much do you care about the subjects who populate your work? And to what degree do you mobilize or weaponize your abilities as an artist to depict said people. I think one of the things that I try to do is to use precedent as my true North. There is a precedent for this work as well. And I always try to sort of stand on the shoulders of all of those amazing works that came before. We have to recognize that while the Madonna and Child is something that's enduring the, the loss of a child is something that is enduring as well and these are things that that we've seen in art history and memorial. One of my more recent bodies of work is marine painting. And in this I'm starting to move against the landscape and out into the sea I'm starting to sort of push beyond some of the territory that I feel comfortable with and going into the irrational. Wildly into the irrational. The Ship of Fools The Ship of Fools is a concept that goes far into European history where people who were inconvenient whether they be queer or mad or social dissidents or politically incorrect were basically rounded up, put on boats and put into insane asylums. Artists consequentially would create paintings about these things and they were called The Ship of Fools paintings. So I created an entire body of work I went back to Haiti where they have this amazing boats that sort of brought to mind Winslow Homer, who's an obvious influence in some of these paintings. Where you would find people looking off into the distance looking off into the sea and what is the sea? Is it a constant? Is it like the land that is terra firma that goes on into the horizon or is it something that lilts and become sort of unknown as is the psyche at times. Psychology becomes really important in this work because the psychology of madness is the undergirding theme of this body of work. The Ship of Fools is ultimately one of those bodies of work that has to be seen not only as painting but as as film. And so I created a film that sort of engaged the painting space that I was dealing with there, the psychological space using the writings of [indistinct] to bring out some of the aspects of madness with regards to the sea. Narrenschiff is, I suppose, the true reference to it. You may recognize this. [Laughter] In 2016, I got a phone call and I was asked to go to the White House and to interview for a gig. [Laughter] A number of us were asked to do it. To this day I have no idea who you guys are. Look me up. I'd love to have that conversation. but this is, this is something that was so difficult to do. Imagine as an artist, trying to walk into a space thinking about portraiture and bidding your case. This was It was hard. I must have said something right because I got the job. And I was in, allowed to become the first black American artist to paint the first black American president. [Applause] One thing you must know One thing you must know about Barack Obama is that he's incredibly and indelibily, a man of the people. When we began this conversation one of the first concerns was how do we get away with all the honorifics. He joked briefly when I was doing the unveiling that I wanted him to be up on a horse. [Laughter] Nothing could be further from the truth. What I did want was to begin a conversation around how most of my work was around people who we don't necessarily pay attention to everyday. People who aren't famous and powerful. And so how does my vocabulary change when turning that light towards you. What you see is the culmination of a lot of back and forth and conversation surrounding his own narrative. All of the flowers that you see in that field are in direct response to his life story. There are flowers from Indonesia, from Hawaii from Chicago, Kenya Beyond that, beyond the sort of spatial moves I think, there was also a sense of how does one self-portray? Remember all those paintings that we just went through with all of the flexing and flossing Here, there is no tie there is, instead there's this sense of like literally, bending in towards you the viewer, a desire to be seen as open and free, calm and strong. This in the end I suppose is the strength of that painting. To this day, social media has made that into a type of new way of thinking about art in this country. I think that's something that we can all be very proud of. There's a something that I have to take very seriously when thinking about art making because It used to be that it was just objects on a wall and increasingly it's becoming the way that people can imagine seeing themselves. in museums across the world and in spaces in which dignity is celebrated all over the place. Thank you. [Applause] I'm gonna open it up to one or two questions. [Off-screen] We have time for a couple questions We actually have, we'd like you to come up here to the mic, if you could please, if you have a question, line up. We'll take a couple. We have one question though that is has been sent in from one of our watch sites at Harris-Stowe State University. We'd like to take a question from our simulcast audience if we could. The students at Harris-Stowe State University You mentioned Mickalene Thomas as being of your contemporary artists that that you respect. Are there any others contemporary artists that have inspired your work, in the United States or outside of the U.S. Are there any other contemporary artists who have inspired by work in the United States or outside of the U.S. Um, yeah. I mean, a lot of us are friends and we talk to each other and we what's really important to know right now especially in this day and age is that we're able to sort of connect and see each other in real time. We're able to see what's going on in studios even at a distance or talk about anxieties. When I was at Yale, the first year, I think it was just me and Wangechi Mutu If you want to have some names, let's add her up there. She's actually one of the bright and shining stars there. The following year, I was joined by Mickalene Thomas, who is an abiding love and joy. But as I moved into New York, I began meeting all number of creative forces. And you can add Hank Willis Thomas into that list. But I think beyond that we have to move a little bit before because I don't want to talk just about peers. I also want to talk about I want to talk about those people who sort of set my arrow going into the right direction. There was a time when I was so used to looking at a type of painting at galleries and museums in southern California and had kind of got into a little bit of a rut. And I turn the corner one day at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and I saw a Kerry James Marshall painting. And it literally changed my life. The ability to, I think I was 14 years old at the time. looking at this painting and thinking if this man can do something like that anything's possible. It was glorious and it remains to be. thinking about the work of Glenn Ligon Kara Walker I don't want to create a go-to list of who my favorite friends friends are because that's going to be that's just going to be too incestuous. But, but what I will do is to say that I've been incredibly blessed with an embarrassment of riches with regards to influences and friends. Can you talk a little bit about why it took you so long to paint women's bodies. Why did it take me so long to paint women's bodies? I don't occupy one. [Laughter] So much of my work is So much of my work is about me and it's selfish and it's and it's happily so. I think the only way that you can point out words and do anything useful is to start in a place of confidence. Start small, and to grow out from there. I think it's important to be able to operate with humility, as well. It took me awhile to be able to feel comfortable to span the globe with this work. Gender is no easy chasm and I'm never going to get it right. Nor is there any true North with regards to how painting should be done by Kehinde and any other person. But I do feel as though if I'm gonna go there give myself a little bit of time to get my swag together. [Laughter] [Applause] [Off camera] This will be our final question. First off, I want to say thank you for your bravery and what you do. My mind is blown. [Laughter] My daughter just left, unfortunately she was an invitee here. My daughter is getting ready to paint a Metro bus tomorrow. I am trying to be, or put her on the same path as you. Also, maybe what shall we do to try to become one of your models? [Laughter] And I mean that with all seriousness. But yes sir, I want to tell you thank you. that's really what I want to say and, like I said, number two, how do I get [Laughter] [Applause] I knew you were somewhere in this room. [Off screen] You saw me! I sat in the seventh row like, There's always one and if you can't find it, it's you. [Off camera] Right? Right? No, I just admire what you do, But yes, sir, I wanna... So I think I did hear some question about your daughter in the beginning. [Laughter] She's nine years old. Her name is Elaheh. It's Hebrew for my god is god. She's done so much. She's in a lot of the art programs that they have every year at Soha or... Every year getting a painting that's sold. So I'm trying to figure out how to branch off where we're going towards you cause exactly what you do is exactly what she does. She paints people herself, self-portrait, it's just amazing what she does. Where's the question in there? So how do we get on the run with you, on a path with you. I know it's like out there. but as well it's the modeling, too... [Kehinde] You are a trip. I mean it. Not to waste everybody's time, but... [Kehinde] This is what I'm gonna do.
You inspire me. Yes sir.
You inspire me. Yes sir. I'm going to interpret your question to be this. How does a young black or brown girl who has the hopes of being an artist or anyone creative with a dream out here get to any level that reaches the heights that she or he wants in this world. I think that those questions can best be asked by turning themselves out into the world. Turning themselves out into history. It's not easy. It's a lot of work. You have to do the hard work. You have to do the reading of all that boring western art history and eastern art history and art theoretical thought. You have to engage yourself in both popular and unpopular cultures. You have to surround yourself by opinions that are both popular and un. You have to do all of that. Find some money to support yourself. It's no easy chore. And then, and then, let me finish. [Laughter] And then move out into the world as though you had never done any of those things. Turn in on yourself and try to concentrate on yourself and figure out what it is that makes you curious about yourself and the things that turn you on. And until you scratch that itch you're not making epic art. I think, I think people look at this art enterprise as being something flip, but it's serious stuff. It's hand to hand combat with yourself and you have prepare yourself and arm yourself as the strongest warrior possible. Thank you guys. Have a good night. [Applause]
Thank you guys. Have a good night. [Applause]
