Self Portraits After Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley was born in California in 1977. His father is from Nigeria and his mother is African-American. For most of Kehinde Wiley’s very successful career, he has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth through nineteenth-century Western art. Wiley gives the authority of those historical sitters to his twenty-first-century subjects. He (mostly) finds models from the street, strangers who don’t necessarily fit into the typical portrait sitting set, which is to say that most great portraits from the past have to do with people who are very powerful and wealthy and use the portrait as a social occasion. In his work, Wiley does the opposite; he juxtaposes the high status of those shown in traditional portraits with the everyday people he represents. In his work, he addresses the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture and his paintings often blur the boundaries between traditional and contemporary.

To create their own powerful, Wiley-inspired portraits, seventh grade students used the grid method over a photograph to accurately draw the contours of their head and shoulders on a large scale. After erasing the grid lines, they used various graphite pencils to add a range of values (shading) to their portrait, which creates a sense of depth and makes it look “real.” After a class critique and lots of hard work, portraits were cut out and placed on their highly patterned, painted backgrounds. Students painted their background using complementary colors, just like Kehinde Wiley often does, and, also like Wiley, some of the background shapes creep onto the shoulders and body of the portrait. I know I say this all of the time, but these photos truly do NOT do this work justice... the real things are 18" x 24" and are simply AMAZING. As usual, my kids just blow me away! Don't you agree?