Kehinde Wiley rose to national recognition after his official portrait of President Obama was unveiled in 2018. But the American artist has been rewriting history and representation in art for nearly two decades.
"He's always been at the forefront of the current art world," said Gaidi Finnie, executive director of the San Diego Museum of African American Fine Art. "He's like the Black American or Black Rock Star artist."
Finnie and the San Diego Museum of African American Fine Art played a role in bringing a Wiley painting to the Timken Museum. It's on loan from a private collection. Wiley's "Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan" is a 2015 reinterpretation of a 1634-1635 painting by Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck.
This Wiley painting is huge, and eye-catching even from far across the museum. In a golden frame, on a vivid — almost psychedelic — botanical wallpaper-style background, a Black man wearing modern clothing rides a white horse. The horse is rearing up. Dr. Fern Nelson, one of the San Diego Museum of African American Fine Art's founding board members described it this way.
“You see a beautiful black man who looks to be in his maybe mid-20s riding the horse. The man is looking at you specifically, with his eyes turned toward you,” Nelson said.
"This is American history."Gaidi Finnie, executive director of the San Diego Museum of African American Fine Art
It's a juxtaposition of old and new, and of histories told and untold. The traditional equestrian portrait pose and finely detailed brushwork evokes the work of 16th and 17th century painters, and this style coexists with the presence of the distinctly contemporary Black man.
This is a throughline in Wiley's work. He takes notable works from art history and reimagines them, replacing the characters with Black models and people of color. In doing so, he's rewriting history, and reclaiming concepts of heroism and glory.
"He's thinking about how those particular figures have been excluded from the history of art. He's putting them into the poses of some of those great paintings and he's making them as vibrant as possible," said Derrick R. Cartwright, the Timken's director of curatorial affairs.
This work is part of a larger series by Wiley called "Rumors of War," which centers on the use of equestrians in art history, replacing their riders with people of color.
"Putting large figures on horseback is something that goes back to antiquity, right? The Roman emperors put themselves on horses to make themselves look more like powerful leaders to the small people before them. And so Wiley is thinking about that history. He's thinking about how he can alter it by putting in new figures and he's also thinking about the politics of the United States. So, he's quite deliberately incorporating these young, powerful, in this case Black men, into this narrative of leadership," Cartwright said.
The Timken intentionally placed the work in a gallery full of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the 17th century. The Wiley is side-by-side, and literally outsizes the museum's world-famous Rembrandt and a different work by van Dyck, the same artist who inspired Wiley's piece. Cartwright said this room in the Timken is basically a lesson in art history.
"This is one of the great places in the country to study 17th century Dutch and Flemish art. And introducing Wiley into that conversation, I just think that makes it a much more interesting place to be," Cartwright said.
"So putting large figures on horseback is something that goes back to antiquity, right? The Roman emperors put themselves on horses to make themselves look more like powerful leaders to the small people before them."Derrick Cartwright, director of curatorial affairs at the Timken Museum
The Timken is always free to the public, which is also fundamental to the mission of the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Art. The museum's goal is to get important Black art in front of as many people as possible.
"Our mission is to bring the best art in the world to San Diego," Finnie said. "The kids and the people in the region need this. This is American history."
The city of San Diego recently asked the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Art to manage the 10-block Black Arts and Culture District in Encanto, but the institution is still a museum without a physical gallery space. Board member Nelson said that a bigger vision for the museum is a space of its own. But she said these collaborations with other venues will always be important.
"I think the goal is both. We would like to have a permanent home so that when people want to come to the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Art, they have a space that they can go to, that way we can do programming as we like, we can get involved with community aspects as we like. We also want to continue to work with the museums of San Diego because we may need to have wonderful spaces such as the Timken to bring artists such as Kehinde Wiley that have enormous portraits. We may need to have museums that have 24/7 security and temperature control — and this is to say that I don't know what our future museum space will be, but to have both options is ideal for us," Nelson said.
Wiley's painting will be on view at the Timken through May 2024.
