Tag: National Portrait Gallery

A Kehinde Wiley portrait is never hard to spot; bursts of jewel-tone colors, Rococo floral swirls, and, usually, a black or brown person as the subject. “The challenge here was to allow certain aspects of Barack Obama’s power and respectability to be a given so that we could move forward with a different type of narrative.” Wiley stripped away the trappings of office in order to depict the former President’s life journey. These botanicals are a challenge to viewers to grapple with the improbability of Obama’s rise. It’s “indicative of the values of his presidency,” she says, “And the notion of a democracy that works from the bottom up instead of from the top down.” For the first time in its 56-year history, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned two African-American artists, Wiley and the Baltimore-based artist Amy Sherald, who created Michelle Obama’s portrait, to paint the First Couple. Former US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama stand before their portraits and respective artists, Kehinde Wiley (L) and Amy Sherald (R), after an unveiling at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 12, 2018. In their portraits, Sherald and Wiley both upend notions of what it means to hold power, particularly as a person of color in America. He was born in Los Angeles in the late ’70s and raised by a single mother as the hip-hop era began to take shape. When Wiley was around 12, he was among a group of 50 students who traveled to Russia to study its language and art. Like Obama, Wiley grew up without his father and traveled to Nigeria to meet him later in life—a parallel between artist and subject that was not lost on either man. As with Wiley, Sherald’s approach to the First Lady’s official portrait was true to her artistic method.