Kehinde Wiley

I learned a lot of interesting things today at Promising Practices, particularly in my first workshop where we talked about race. I liked this workshop because it talked about race in the media which we have spent a good deal talking about in class so I was already a little familiar. I learned of a painter named Kehinde Wiley. What he does is he paints black men in higher ranked white man poses. The example the instructor gave was the pose of Mary shown below. He painted a black man in this holy pose, why? I liked the different ideas discussed. Wiley is trying to break racial stereotypes. Here we have a black man wearing pink and purple who is surrounded by flowers. This is definitely not a dangerous image as we so often relate to black people as being violent. In this painting he is as innocent as Mary. Look at his tattoos. It says to me, hey without these clothes I may have tattoos and look scary, but I'm innocent. I couldn't hurt a thing.



I like that he poses himself as higher ranked white people such as the Virgin Mary, who is a prominent religious figure. He has done this with Napoleon and others as well. It shows the black man as equal to the higher ranked white person. He is definitely sending a message. I'm sure you can think of a lot of things that he is saying and portraying in this image just as I know I could go on forever talking about it. You can see more of his painting if you CLICK HERE!