Kehinde Wiley
The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar
The Studio Museum in Harlem
Through October 26, 2008
[link to published article on WhiteHotMagazine.com]

Kehinde Wiley’s wildly successful career proves that as long as art history is alive, contemporary painting will never be dead.

At the ripe age of 31, the Brooklyn-based artist has already achieved the unthinkable for most artists. His large-scale, heroic portraits of contemporary African-American male youths, which reference three hundred years of iconic Western portraiture—as illustrated by Rubens, Valazquez, Ingres, Gainsborough and Sargent—have made their way into major museum collections, top collectors’ homes, an advertising campaign for VH1’s “Hip-Hop Honors” show in 2005, and even an interview on The Today Show with Matt Lauer in 2006.

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