LF: Obama Painter Kehinde Wiley Known For Portraying Black Heroines Decapitating White Women

Title: Obama Painter Kehinde Wiley Known For Portraying Black Heroines Decapitating White Women
Source: Information Liberation
URL Source: http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=57948
Published: Feb 12, 2018
Author: Chris Menahan
Post Date: 2018-02-13 09:17:28 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 283
Comments: 3

Barack Obama unveiled his official portrait as painted by artist Kehinde Wiley at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC on Monday.

"Wiley typically portrays people of color posing as famous figures in Western art," the Portrait Gallery said of his work. "Through this practice, he challenges the visual rhetoric of power that is dominated by elite white men."

"Barack Obama said he admired how Wiley's photos 'challenge our conventional views of power and privilege,'" NPR reports.

Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Obama. pic.twitter.com/8XruEgzgMK — Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) February 12, 2018

Part of challenging the "power" of white people evidently involves angry black women decapitating white women, which Wiley has a fixation for:

Here's the background on the piece from the North Carolina Museum of Art:

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. Wiley uses “street casting” to find his models—walking city streets and asking ordinary people if they would pose for a portrait. He met the model for this painting, Treisha Lowe, at Fulton Mall, a pedestrian shopping street in downtown Brooklyn. This painting references a specific art-historical work, a 17th-century painting by Giovanni Baglione, Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1608). 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.

Wiley takes obvious artistic license with the story—Holofernes is represented by a woman’s head, and Judith wears a gown designed by Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy. This new rendition can be interpreted on many different levels, including racial and gender identity and inequity, the representation of women throughout art history, and society’s ideals for beauty. In Wiley’s words, “I am painting women in order to come to terms with the depictions of gender within the context of art history. One has to broaden the conversation . . . This series of works attempts to reconcile the presence of black female stereotypes that surrounds their presence and/or absence in art history, and the notions of beauty, spectacle, and the ‘grand’ in painting.”

Imagine if President Trump had his official portrait painted by a white artist known for his portraits of white women decapitating black women.

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Technically, he isn't bad at portraiture. His work is realistic but not photographic. He seems very weak at painting background elements, instead just painting floral backgrounds that look like cheesy wallpaper or fabric prints.

His portrait of 0bama is weak. 0bama doesn't really hunch like that, doesn't fold his arms like that typically, when he does fold his arms, his cuffs don't ride up like that, his legs look like an amputee with prosthetic legs. 0bama is always very poised, very careful about how his expensive suits drape, careful to keep the crease in his pants so flawless that David Brooks swoons over him. And that chair 0bama is sitting on looks like a bad high-school art project.

I saw that HuffPo and Twitter and others really panned these two portraits as immature and unsatisfactory portraits of the 0bamas. So no one likes them. I was surprised when they disparaged them so vehemently. I didn't expect that.

He is a racist POS. Someone should paint a picture of him hanging from a tall tree, by a short rope, shitting & pissing in his pants, with his neck stretched, and his tongue hanging out !!

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