The painter Kehinde Wiley gained recognition in the early 2000s for transfiguring hip-hop style into the idiom of the Old Masters. Now he’s become one of the most influential figures in global Black culture.
Directly behind me was a porcelain statue of Chairman Mao with his legs casually crossed. In 2006, Wiley opened a large studio with a sculpture workshop in Beijing, where he also rented an apartment, learned Mandarin, and started dating a local d.j. This marked the beginning of a transition from hot-shot painter to diversified global enterprise. Starting in China, Wiley embarked on a series called “The World Stage,” an atlas of the Black figure and the world’s decorative traditions.
The curtain came down on a bower-side chat with America’s supreme confidant. The President sits, sans tie, with arms folded in a posture of vigilant welcome, surrounded by flowers symbolizing Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya. Obama’s feet don’t touch the ground; the author of “Dreams from My Father” seems to levitate on an antique chair of the kind that Freddie Mae once stocked among the houseplants at My Father’s Business. The artist cried as he thanked his mother from the podium.
Generally, by the time a painting reaches Wiley everything except the figure is finished. The artist is free to refine his own specialty: skin, or, in Ellisonian terms, the Blackness of Blackness. Wiley was trained to mix underpainting—a preliminary layer that many artists use as a chromatic keynote—in shades of burnt umber, terra-cotta, and sienna, a spectrum that he described as a “scaffolding” for white skin.
Soon he began welcoming trios of artists for one- to three-month stays, with plans to curate an exhibition of their work at Dak’Art, Africa’s longest-running biennial, in 2020. Instead, Wiley spent more than a year with a cohort of fellows in lockdown, sketching employees and captaining weekly fishing trips to pass the time. The artist grew so attached to life in Senegal that only Naomi Campbell could force him out, with a summons to judge at Lagos Fashion Week.
Wiley calls them the Doors of Return, alluding to the Door of No Return, which commemorates victims of the slave trade, and his nightly gatherings had the air of a glamorous family’s never-ending reunion. Guests lounged in an art-filled great room as waiters in black-and-gold uniforms circulated with seafood caught by the host. The window walls offered aquarium views of a patio and a kaleidoscopically lit infinity pool.
A project that originated in the search for family has since become inextricable from it. Wiley often cooks meals for the fellows; recently, he began sponsoring the son of a single mother who works for him as a housekeeper, assuming a paternal role in the boy’s life. The next stage of Wiley’s homecoming odyssey will take him back to Nigeria, where he and Taiwo have built a fifteen-acre estate in a village near their father’s ancestral home.
Snapshots ricocheted across Instagram, but more important networks were forming in the room, where the dance between art and material power—so integral to Wiley’s paintings—seemed to have leaped off the canvas. Among those present were bankers, an oil executive, the U.S. Ambassador, and two French-Togolese sisters with connections to major museums, who had previously introduced Wiley to Togo’s President, Faure Gnassingbé.
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