On Monday, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
hosted a ceremonial unveiling of former President Obama’s official presidential
portrait. An official portrait of Michelle Obama was also revealed at the same
event.
Kehinde Wiley, the artist behind Obama’s portrait, is not
some run-of-the-mill painter, however.
His best known works all place a strong
emphasis on promoting an ideal of empowered black men and women, frequently
including regal or aristocratic imagery and floral or naturalistic background
designs.
Two such paintings have come into sharp focus today because of their
depictions of black women holding bloody knives and the severed heads of white
women.
Both paintings depict a reimagining of traditional European
paintings of the Biblical character Judith beheading the Assyrian general
Holofernes, except Wiley changed Judith into a black woman and Holofernes into
a white woman.
Wiley's official website prominently displays the artist
posing in front of one of the beheading paintings in a photograph presumably
taken in his studio.
The other painting can be found under Wiley's 2012
collection titled "An
Economy of Grace" and was described by the artist himself as
a "play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing." A
description of the painting from the North Carolina Museum of Art's official blog makes clear
that Wiley's conscious intention was to create a work that glorified the image
of a black woman holding power over a white woman by killing her [emphasis
mine]:
Known
for his monumental portraits of young black men, placed in historical poses and
settings appropriated from Old Master paintings, Kehinde Wiley critiques the
racism of art history while also commenting on contemporary street culture and
masculine identity. Reinventing classical portraiture and questioning who is
represented in the portraits found in museums worldwide, Wiley states, “The
whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.”
Judith and Holofernes is from Wiley’s most recent body
of work and his first series of paintings to feature female subjects. [...] The
subject is taken from the apocryphal Old Testament Book of Judith, in which a
Jewish town is under attack by the Assyrian army led by the general Holofernes.
Judith, a widow from the town, goes to Holofernes under the pretense of helping
him defeat the Jews. After he falls asleep, she cuts his head off with his own
sword, and the town defeats the army. Wiley translates this image of a
courageous, powerful woman into a contemporary version that resonates with fury
and righteousness.
At Monday's ceremony, Wiley commended the Obamas for
hiring black artists to paint their official portraits and suggested that the
couple were sending a necessary message to America and the world that it is
okay to be black. According to CNN:
"We
can't not recognize the important significance of representation in art and the
decision that this president and first lady have made in choosing artists like
ourselves," said Kehinde Wiley, a Yale University-trained painter who was
the first African-American artist to execute an official presidential portrait
for the National Portrait Gallery.
"[T]hey're
signaling to the rest of the world that it is OK to occupy skin that happens to
look like this ... on the great walls of museums in the world," he told
CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
"In
so doing what I see there is true leadership," Wiley continued. "I
see people who have the vision and the intent to not only be great people, but
great thought leaders."
In a piece for The New York Times, Co-Chief Art
Critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Holland Cotter praised Obama's choice of Wiley
as his painter [emphasis mine]:
With
the unveiling here Monday at the National Portrait Gallery of the official
presidential likenesses of Barack Obama and the former first lady, Michelle
Obama, this city of myriad monuments gets a couple of new ones, each
radiating, in its different way, gravitas (his) and glam (hers).
(…)
Not
only are the Obamas the first African-American presidential couple to be
enshrined in the collection. The painters they’ve picked to portray
them — Kehinde Wiley, for Mr. Obama’s portrait; Amy Sherald, for Mrs.
Obama — are African-American as well. Both artists have
addressed the politics of race consistently in their past work, and both
have done so in subtly savvy ways in these new commissions. Mr. Wiley depicts
Mr. Obama not as a self-assured, standard-issue bureaucrat, but as an alert and
troubled thinker. Ms. Sherald’s image of Mrs. Obama overemphasizes an element
of couturial spectacle, but also projects a rock-solid cool.
It
doesn’t take #BlackLivesMatter consciousness to see the significance of this
racial lineup within the national story as told by the Portrait Gallery. Some
of the earliest presidents represented — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson —
were slaveholders; Mrs. Obama’s great-great grandparents were slaves. And
today we’re seeing more and more evidence that the social gains of the civil
rights, and Black Power, and Obama eras are, with a vengeance, being rolled
back.
Wait a minute, did he really just say "the social
gains" of "Black Power" and tie that in with Obama's presidency?
What exactly have black power movements done to positively advance social
discourse in either the past or the present?
Unfortunately, Cotter did not explain his comments about
Obama, civil rights, and Black Power, but he did go on to paint his own
glamorous and laudatory textual portrait of Wiley while scrupulously avoiding
any mention of the decapitation paintings:
Mr.
Obama has much better luck with his similarly high-profile portraitist. Mr.
Wiley, born in Los Angeles in 1977, gained a following in the early 2000s with
his crisp, glossy, life-size paintings of young African-American men dressed in
hip-hop styles, but depicted in the old-master manner of European royal
portraits. More recently he has expanded his repertoire to include female
subjects, as well as models from Brazil, India, Nigeria and Senegal, creating
the collective image of a global black aristocracy.
(…)
[Wiley]
focused early on African-American portraiture precisely because it is so little
represented in Western art history. [...] Mr. Wiley, with photo-realistic
precision, casts actual people in fantastically heroic roles. (He modifies his
heroizing in the case of Mr. Obama, but it’s still there.)
If anyone was in doubt about Obama's extreme political
leanings before, hopefully his choice of Wiley to paint his official portrait
clarifies the matter for good.
