In a darkened show space inside San Francisco’s de Young museum, Kehinde Wiley strikes a contemplative pose for the camera, as if channeling the throngs of people expected to flutter through here to consider his latest exhibition: an Archeology of Silence.
The turnabout is fair play for Wiley, the estimable portraitist renowned for drafting people off the street to model for works in the style of old masters such as Jacques-Louis David. But instead of Napoleon on a horse, he’ll swap in a Black man wearing a bandanna, camouflage suit and Timberland boots.
If Wiley seems comfortable being closely examined, it’s because he got plenty of experience while “developing his chops” at San Francisco’s Art Institute. “I was actually a nude model for a brief time for all the figures classes,” recalled Wiley of the awkward experience of posing for fellow students. But the value in it for him went beyond the $15 an hour salary. “All of the bodies that I was painting were white models,” he explained on a tour of his latest exhibition. “I can perhaps say I was painting white bodies longer than any. There’s a tradition of learning to create shadow and light, of molding the body into something that’s beautiful that I learned through painting whiteness. It’s a strange notion to arrive at Blackness through whiteness.”
