The only matter glowing brighter than Sonia Robinson’s identity are her wildly imaginative paintings. She creates whimsical and typically spiritually-encouraged compositions that are really mesmerizing. Robinson slings her paint seemingly non-end, largely on wooden panels – and sometimes on canvas – working with her signature, combined-media method, making her do the job like practically nothing else you are going to uncover.
Robinson’s self-taught design and style helps to set her get the job done apart from that of other artists. She has a playful, childlike managing of her topics guaranteed to carry about inner thoughts of pleasure in the hearts and minds of viewers.
Robinson was born in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and vacationed to the Keys back again in 1970. This began a really like affair with the islands that continues to this working day. These days, the Florida Keys are her second home and she evidently can make the most of her time right here.
Robinson’s expressionism incorporates aspects of blended-media collage together with occasional typography employed to further the favourable messages of appreciate, hope and kindness embedded inside of her creations. Acrylic paint is her main medium, but Robinson builds depth via vivid coloration mixtures and versions on thick (tactile) paint apps concluded with skinny washes of lessened regularity color and gloss. The finish outcome is only good.
“I initially began my artwork occupation as a wonderful leather craftsman, and I’m continue to acknowledged these days as the ‘Leather Girl of Critical West,’” reported Robinson. “Over the yrs, I did collections for Fast Buck Freddie’s and even had my possess business on Greene Street. I moved into Guild Hall Gallery in the early 1980s and expanded into hand painted clothes. From there it was an quick leap to portray in the structure I use currently.”
Robinson has an unbelievably large physique of operate spanning topics from architecture and angels to lovable canines and curious kittens. With regards to the recurring topic of puppies, she stated, “My operate is ever-evolving and I paint what I like. My husband Gregg and I have normally had rescue canines and they clearly show up in much of my operate.”
Robinson is an proprietor of Guild Corridor Gallery located at 614 Duval St. in Old City Crucial West. She welcomes guests to come join with her there and acquire the best piece of her artwork. “My biggest thrill is to be at the gallery and fulfill individuals buying my artwork. There is always a terrific story to go along with it and the connection is heartfelt for me. I am privileged to get up every working day and do what I really like.”
The tropical flavor and bold and brilliant colors in her paintings combine with an unmistakable style adored by artwork enthusiasts and collectors through the Florida Keys and over and above. Make the journey down to Previous City Critical West and stop by her colorful creations today. Her paintings are available in just about every size and condition possible, from little 4-inch sq. panels to much larger-than-existence florals and still lifestyle paintings on stretched canvas. Price ranges on modest prints, playing cards and tiny paintings vary from $12 to $35, and her greater items are out there from $100 to $800.
On February 3rd, a new artwork show opens in the K.K. Berge developing titled “Verdant One”, showcasing the do the job of artist Anya Kalk. Kalk, from Sweden, has been browsing Granite Falls on a vacationer visa for the past three months, keeping with her boyfriend and assembly local artists. The thought was presented for her to generate an exhibit with her artwork early on in her continue to be, and she agreed. For the 3 months, Kalk suggests she labored to understand a new medium. “I’m generally a woodcarver, normally,” she says. “I started wooden carving in Sweden – green woodworking and standard woodworking. I’ve also examined classic costuming for a although. Which is how I acquired commenced with common crafts, mainly. I’ve also analyzed design and style and arts a very little little bit.”
Since she didn’t have her equipment along with her on this journey, Kalk arrived up with the concept to make an exhibit that includes block printing. “I selected block printing because it’s a small a lot quicker to do. I needed to consider anything new,” she states. Without having a instructor, she states the course of action proved somewhat difficult. “The carving is really quick because I know how to carve, but the printing method with the ink and paper has been really hard to figure out – the suitable quantity of paint and strain and all of that,” she says.
Kalk’s block prints are impressed by a historical Swedish ornament, termed the “green man”, who is typically depicted as a confront designed of or surrounded by leaves. In accordance to a push launch from the Granite Falls Arts Council, the record of the symbol is considered to day again to above two thousand several years in the past and has many interpretations. “It is often connected to purely natural deities or woodland spirits and is most typically utilised as a image of rebirth and spring. It is also believed to have been made use of as a ward to frighten absent evil spirits. The eco-friendly person appears in a variety of sections of the planet in the course of background. This exhibition builds on that historical past and is Anya’s interpretation of the symbol,” the press release states. All of the pieces on display screen were being established through Kalk’s time in Granite Falls.
Kalk suggests she has always been intrigued in studying regular tactics and functioning with conventional materials to explore her creativeness. She commenced her do the job in the arts at the age of 15. “I’ve normally favored coming up with points and earning my personal stuff,” she says. Kalk’s authentic function was in historical costuming, but locating herself with a 12 months concerning scientific tests, she decided to check out doing work with wood and observed it interesting plenty of to switch her focus from costuming to carving.
This is the 1st time Kalk has had a solo art exhibit, but she will be flying back again to Sweden on the opening day of the show so she will have to witness it from afar. She did say that she feels the do the job to get ready for this exhibit, and the experience concerned with organizing it will encourage her to go after far more possibilities like it in the future. “That’s certainly the target to do some far more,” she says.
For further information about Kalk’s work you can contact her instantly at anya.kalk@outlook.com or locate her on instagram @anyakalk, or search up the gallery @makers_on_the_minnesota.
There is a long tradition among scientists of comparing scientific models, images, theories and experiments to works of art. We are told that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the double helix structure of DNA molecules, and images of colliding particles are beautiful, and that, just like works of art, they evoke in us aesthetic responses. Scientists themselves, like artists, are praised for their creativity, originality and aesthetic sensibility. Einstein, for one, regarded the American physicist Albert Michelson, who with Edward Morley co-designed the experiment to measure the velocity of Earth relative to the ether, as ‘the Artist in Science’, claiming that not only did Michelson care for devising a good experiment, he wanted his creations to be beautiful too.
So what does it mean for an experiment to be beautiful? Let us start with the example of Foucault’s pendulum, which allows us to illustrate three important ways in which an experiment can be beautiful. In 1851, the French physicist Léon Foucault devised a way of demonstrating that Earth rotates on its axis. He hung a heavy metal weight from a long cable fixed to the inside of the dome of the Panthéon in Paris. When he set this pendulum in motion, it slowly swung back and forth, tracing lines in sand placed beneath it. After some time, it became clear that the traces were not all in one line because of Earth’s rotation beneath the pendulum.
This pendulum was beautiful in an obvious visual sense – as a kind of kinetic sculpture with an almost mesmeric, slow, back-and-forth movement. Scientific equipment can indeed be beautiful, and often is. Take, for instance, chemical retorts, prisms, microscopes and complicated structures built in laboratories. Museums house beautifully crafted scientific instruments and equipment from the past because we can appreciate their aesthetic features. The phenomena we study in the experimental setup – such as copper sulphate crystals, rainbows produced by prisms, and the microscopic structure of cells – can be beautiful too. But what made Foucault’s pendulum a beautiful experiment is more than its visual beauty. Far more importantly, it showed the effects of Earth’s rotation, something important that hadn’t been demonstrated before, and it did this in a clever, imaginative and elegant way. The pendulum itself was beautiful, but the ultimate beauty of the experiment is a combination of its significance and its design.
It’s hard to identify the most beautiful experiment in science, but one of the most beautiful in biology was designed by the American geneticists Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl to discover how DNA replicates. What is it about this experiment that makes it beautiful? To understand this, first let us reflect on what the experiment set out to do. It was performed only a few years after one of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century: the discovery in 1953 of the double helix structure of DNA. With the structure of DNA established, the next question the scientific community needed to address was how DNA replicated. There were already three different hypotheses proposed: 1) conservative replication, according to which each of the two strands of the parent DNA molecule are replicated in the new one; 2) semi-conservative replication, according to which one strand of the parent DNA is conserved in the daughter DNA; and 3) dispersive replication, according to which the parent DNA chains break at intervals, with the parental segments combining with new segments to form the daughter DNA. Meselson and Stahl set out to give an answer to the question of how DNA replicates by designing an experiment that would decisively discriminate between the three proposed hypotheses.
In 1958, the two scientists published the results of that experiment. What they had done to determine the correct hypothesis on DNA replication was to feed bacteria nutrients containing a heavy nitrogen isotope that gets incorporated into the bacterial molecules through metabolising. They studied the genetic material through the next generations, knowing the rates at which bacteria multiply. Instead of using radioactive labelling of the DNA strands, which was common at the time, they decided to use density, and separated the heavy DNA from the light using density-gradient centrifugation. By studying the ratios of light, heavy and hybrid DNA that they obtained, Meselson and Stahl were able to eliminate the conservative and dispersive replication hypotheses, confirming that DNA in fact replicates semi-conservatively.
A further aspect of its aesthetic value is not only what this research taught us but also how it did so
One of the reasons why this experiment is celebrated in science is because it is an example of an experimentum crucis, or a ‘crucial experiment’. Such experiments are important; they deliver a decisive answer to a question. Usually, an experiment is considered crucial when it confirms a hypothesis among alternative competitors, and thus settles a dispute. It is from this ability to deliver a decisive answer to the question of how DNA replicates that the Meselson-Stahl experiment can be considered to derive its beauty. The results are taken to have been clear and straightforward, to have decisively spoken in favour of one of the contender hypotheses, and to have dismissed the alternatives. In his book Beauty and the Beast (1999), the German historian of science Ernst Peter Fischer argues that ‘the Meselson-Stahl experiments speak … for themselves and made all further commentary superfluous’. In his historyMeselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA (2001), Frederic Lawrence Holmes further argues that the simplicity and clarity of the result makes this experiment easily presentable even to students, serving as an exemplar experiment for science education.
The above considerations focus on what the Meselson-Stahl experiment did, the significance of its results, but a further aspect of its aesthetic value is not only what this research taught us but also how it did so, and this later consideration concerns its design. The Meselson-Stahl experiment is regarded as having an elegant and apt design that is optimally suited for the purpose it set out to achieve. Following the reasoning behind their experimental setup reveals the ingenious beauty of the design that the scientists created. By making the genetic material initially heavy and then light, Meselson and Stahl could extract and measure its weight through the next generations. It is this idea that makes their design original and elegant, and they used the optimal materials and techniques for the job. As such, their simple experiment integrates innovative and creative thinking, and shows aptness by delivering on what the elegant experiment was designed to do, by conclusively deciding which hypothesis was correct.
Having established that the beauty of experiments lies in the elegance and simplicity of their design, the significance of their results and the creative thinking of their designers, I now want to consider whether these aesthetic ideals have carried over to contemporary experiments in science.
There is a clear asymmetry between experiments of a century ago and experiments today. Past experiments, such as the Meselson-Stahl experiment, often involved a few scientists in a room, relatively cheap equipment, and generally the results could be perceived or established without lengthy interpretative work. Experiments today look rather different. Take, for instance, CERN’s experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, which not too long ago made one of the most significant discoveries in the history of particle physics: the detection of the Higgs boson that was predicted by the Standard Model. This experiment involves highly complex machinery (which has its own kind of beauty) and data analysis; it is the result of collaborative work between thousands of scientists; and the very boundary of the experiment transcends the borders of countries. Given their complexity and size, do large-scale experiments fit with previous aesthetic ideals? Have they become aesthetically disvalued, or can they still be praised for their aesthetic features?
It is undeniable that such contemporary experiments are highly complex: from the machinery they use to the data they produce, they can overwhelm with their size and setup. However, perhaps there is still scope to assign a similar aesthetic value to them as to experiments from a century ago. It seems to me that, despite the complexity behind large-scale experiments, design and aptness continue to be the subject of aesthetic appreciation, and so is the creativity and originality exhibited in the experiment’s design. This is despite the fact that the creativity exhibited in the experimental design is now better ascribed to the collective thinking of the community, rather than necessarily to a specific individual, and the optimality and aptness of the design is concealed beneath the complexity of the experimental setup and the machinery involved.
The appreciation of beauty in science, and in art, is not necessarily immediate to us
Even if we could make the argument that similar aesthetic features get praised during different experimental traditions, there is a further difference between experiments from a century ago and those of today that perhaps should force us to reconsider the claim of similarity. The difference concerns the way in which we arrive at experimental results. As mentioned earlier, one of the aspects we can appreciate in the experiments on DNA replication is their immediacy: we can observe the results in a ‘singular historical event’, as Holmes noted. Such immediacy was characteristic of many, although certainly not all, early experiments. Let’s go back to the experiments that natural philosophers performed with the air pump, which allowed them to study many phenomena with a newly invented instrument that could extract air from a cylinder.
As the painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby depicts, one could immediately perceive the effect on the living creature when the air from the cylinder was extracted using the air pump, which in turn generated a variety of responses in the audience, from fascination and awe to terror. Similarly, we can see the rainbow through Isaac Newton’s prisms, and we can see the bands of light-, heavy- and intermediate-density genetic material in the Meselson-Stahl experiments.
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), by Joseph Wright of Derby. Courtesy the National Gallery, London
But is there anything immediate when it comes to detecting particles and forces in a huge particle accelerator such as those detected by the LHC? Is there any sense in which the experimenter perceives the result in a ‘singular historical event’? Large-scale experiments often involve lengthy statistical data analysis before the experimental scientists can agree whether the data collection indicates an ‘event’ and whether the event constitutes a discovery. But this asymmetry between experiments with immediately perceivable results and those whose results involve time-consuming analysis, while noteworthy, is not surprising. It simply shows us that the appreciation of beauty in science, and in art, does not always involve perceptual features, and the aesthetic response is not necessarily immediate to us. After all, while many paintings and sculptures might evoke in us an immediate aesthetic response, this is certainly not necessary, and is certainly not the case when we consider artworks such as novels and concertos. We need some time and work to get through an entire novel or a concerto before we can fully appreciate its beauty and aesthetic significance more generally. Similarly with the results of many, especially very complex, experiments, it is ultimately the appreciation of the interplay between design and the significance of the result that provokes the aesthetic response.
So far, we have seen that design is an integral part of our aesthetic appreciation of experiments, but we also seem to value those experiments that did something important: whose results helped to confirm a theory or to make a discovery. A final point I want to explore is how we can understand the significance of experiments that produce null results – can such experiments be beautiful too? Both the abovementioned experiments – the Meselson-Stahl and the Michelson-Morley – were highly original and elegant in their design. But while the former helped confirm the nature of DNA replication, the latter did not deliver on what it was designed to do: the interferometer never detected ether drift, despite continued attempts. Is the Michelson-Morley experiment then disqualified from being beautiful, because of the null results?
I have argued that our understanding of what qualifies as a successful experiment needs to be much broader than simply its confirmation of a hypothesis or its discovery of a predicted particle. For example, the existence of the ether was once an undisputed assumption, until Michelson and Morley set up their incredibly careful experiment, which showed creativity and imagination in its elegant design. Even though it turned out that there is no such thing as an ether, their null results challenged accepted beliefs at the time and prompted the exploration of a new paradigm. So the Michelson-Morley experiment is beautiful because it offered the most elegant way to achieve its goal: the two scientists exhibited original and creative thinking, inventing one of the period’s most precise measurement devices, and delivering an experiment of insurmountable scientific import.
Contrary to Meselson and Stahl, who did deliver an answer aligning with scientific expectation, the results of the Michelson-Morley experiments were disruptive. But it is this disruptive nature of their results that prompted the identification of the limitations of our knowledge and opened the door to revisit and reformulate our physics, leading to the acceptance of Einstein’s special theory of relativity and the abandonment of the Newtonian framework. The design was beautiful, the setup careful and original, and the results were disruptive, surprising and awe-provoking. Just like many artworks that challenge our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and our place in the world, beautiful experiments can deliver results that prompt us to reconsider our working assumptions. Their aesthetic significance is intricately related to our state of understanding, and illustrates the diverse nature of the aesthetic experiences that scientific products and artworks can elicit.
Bhubaneswar: On the closing ceremony of the METIS Initiative on Plastics and Indo-Pacific Ocean 2021 at Utsha Foundation here this evening, the grant-winning artist Manveer Singh shared his experience at the month-long residency and also displayed a short film on his journey in Odisha in transforming his ideas to create beautiful art from plastics and also generating awareness among people and especially among the youth and students.
Today’s installation by Manveer at Utsha created a wall of Olive Ridley turtles hanged from net and the artist has the concept to tell to the visitors, how human activities like fishing are killing the turtles. The tiny ones consuming plastics are also facing life threat near the coastline and especially adjacent locations near the mass nesting grounds. The work today at Utsha, thus explained all the challenges behind the lifecycle of the Olive Ridley turtles, which are in love with the Odishan coast.
The wonderful event on art and sustainability was attended by Consulate General of France Kolkata Mr. Talpain, Regional Director South Asia AgenceFrançaise de Développement (AFD) or French Development Agency Mr. Jacky Amprou, Director AFD India Mr. Bruno Bosle and Sector Portfolio Manager AFD Mrs. Fanny Ragot and Founder of Utsha Foundation and eminent artistJagannath Panda, among others.
Congratulating Manveer, the Consulate General of France Mr. Talpain said ‘’this artistic food for thought is the reminder that art and artists have the power to influence the way we think about the environment. I strongly believe that artists have the power not just to raise awareness about critical issues, but their work is also the key to creating real world impact.’’
Delhi-based artist Manveer Singh’s concept “From Plastic to Art” was selected from 26 applicants. During his stay for the Utsha Residency in association with AFD, Manveer visited various institutions and offices and distributed 40 habit changer boxes to collect the layered plastics to make the tiny turtles for his art work. He also organized a workshop with 28 Peer Leaders (PragatiSathis) of the Bhubaneswar Smart City so that the concept of “From Plastic to Art” is translated to action by others in the society. Peer Leaders are youth and student leaders of Bhubaneswar Smart City to create public awareness among the 100 slums across the Temple City. The workshop was organized at BDA City Centre (NICCO Park) where the Quick Win project under City Investments to Innovate, Integrate and Sustain (CITIIS) is under implementation in Bhubaneswar.
Manveer also conducted a workshop for students at Unit VI Girls High School in which 50 students participated. He also interacted with more than 15 families residing in Government quarters near Utsha Foundation. His installation on Puri sea beach also attracted more than 5,000 visitors on November 24.
The artist, popularly known as “Plastic Wallah’’ in Delhi, has dedicated his works in creating awareness on the menace of plastics in and around the human habitations. However, as the marine ecology is going to be severely affected by plastics by 2050, the artist feels, the awareness level should also get more attention so that the oceans and their ecosystems would be less affected by the plastics and their derivatives.
The METIS initiative is part ofAFD celebrating its 80th Anniversary on December 2, this year and for this the agency has planned events across the Indo-Pacific Region including India, Mauritius and Indonesia. AFD has decided to launch a global initiative METIS, to create a global public opinion on marine debris and pollution.
While this has encouraged participation of artists in India to express their ideas relating to plastic waste production, management and its ill effects on the fragile coastal ecosystem, in Mauritius and Indonesia music and comics respectively were used to create the public awareness.
Currently, AFD is also funding the CITIIS Programme in Bhubaneswar and 11 other cities of India through the Smart City Mission. AFD is funding CITIIS Programme here, supported by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, European Union and National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi and the Government of Odisha.
But DaCosta Ahern died on April 19 last year, before the gallery was able to pay the studio a visit.
“She was just this quiet, but vivacious personality,” said Folsom.
“Even though she was quiet, she would always challenge you,” added Flythe, “challenge your beliefs and challenge the way you thought about things.”
Elizabeth DaCosta Ahern’s “O Mar Salgado” Handout/Courtesy Galerie d’Orsay
On Saturday’s showing of DaCosta Ahern’s work, Galerie d’Orsay presented a thread from mentor to mentee. “Jump In! Celebrating the thread between student + mentor” features a few of Frankenthaler’s works such as “Causeway” and “Aerie,” around 30 of DaCosta Ahern’s paintings, and then carries through to some of her students’ art. The works will be on view until the end of the year.
Severalspeakers remembered DaCosta Ahern’s influence. DaCosta Ahern’s husband, Thomas J. Ahern Jr., read aloud condolences sent to him by some of DaCosta Ahern’s students throughout the years. “I can tell you that she will be missed terribly … I will hear [her] in my head whenever I am painting, so I will still have her in my life,” one note read.
Originally from Providence, DaCosta Ahern taught at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lesley University, and Worcester Art Museum. A graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the 1970s, she later made it her mission to mentor students.
In a phone interview, her husband recalled a recent visit he madeto the Concord Center for Visual Arts. Coincidentally, three of the faculty artists presenting work were formerstudents of DaCosta Ahern.
“She had an imprint on many working artists and very successful artists,” Ahern Jr. said.
Along with some of her students,DaCosta Ahern was a participant in the Art in Embassies program, exploring and presenting her work in Portugal and Angola. Frankenthaler encouraged her to partake in her workshops, resulting in six trips to Sante Fe,according to Ahern Jr.
“Every trip produced something,” he said. “She was a beautiful person who made beautiful paintings.”
Elizabeth DaCosta Ahern’s “Luanda Sunset”Handout/Courtesy Galerie d’Orsay
Many of DaCosta Ahern’s friends and students were in attendance at the exhibit. Laura Lester said she felt both honored and grateful to be able to share her artwith her mentor.
“[Elizabeth] would stand back with you and look at your work and not talk until she was ready to say something that was meaningful,” Lester said in an interview. “I will always miss her, and when I paint, I talk to her, and I hope she’s talking to me.”
After59 years of marriage,“I feel enhanced,” Ahern Jr. said, noting that he couldn’thelp but feel her presence at the gallery. “I feel grateful, except for the quantum of sadness and so forth, and the unavoidable remembrances looking at all her work.”
According to those who knew her, DaCosta Ahern always knew when her paintings were finished.
“I think it was innate in her,” Folsom said. “I wouldn’t say that about everyone.”
“Jump In! Celebrating the thread between student + mentor” is an ongoing exhibit until the end of the year at the Galerie d’Orsay on 33 Newbury St.
Ramsey Khalifeh can be reached at ramsey.khalifeh@globe.com.
Kehinde Wiley has a love-hate relationship with western art history. “There’s something glorious about the portraits that you see of aristocrats and royal families. Something beautiful in those expansive imperialist landscapes.” But there’s a dead end. Such paintings, from the baroque, rococo, renaissance and Dutch golden age eras, are ultimately displays of European power, wealth, and beauty. “What I wanted to do was to take the good parts, the parts that I love, and fertilise them with things that I know to be beautiful – people who happen to look like me.”
Wiley, 44, beloved by hip-hop superstars, signed to a Hollywood talent agency, and the first Black, gay artist to paint a US president’s official portrait, rose to art world fame in the 2000s for reimagining such classic European paintings with Black protagonists. His brightly coloured work is easy to identify: glowing brown skin, statuesque poses, richly patterned, often floral, backgrounds and a roster of unfamiliar but photogenic faces. His subversion of the conventions of the medium often involved creating pastiches that foreground Black youth and hip-hop culture and fashion; his works include remakes of Napoleon Crossing the Alps, by Jacques-Louis David, Jacob de Graeff by Gerard ter Borch andThe Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger. While he is famed for painting celebrities and cultural figures, from Spike Lee to LL Cool J, Questlove to Ice-T (his best known work is his 2018 portrait of Barack Obama, sitting relaxed on a wooden chair and surrounded by an abundance of leafy flowers), his work is just as likely to feature ordinary Black people he has found by scouring the local neighbourhoods.
In a similar way to other African American artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald and Jordan Casteel, Wiley’s work inserts Black faces into historical white spaces and thus also into the canon of painting. “It’s an opportunity for people who traditionally have had very little relationship to museums and to what’s on their walls, to feel themselves included,” he says.
Speaking over Zoom from New York, Wiley appears in a good mood. He’s at the SoHo Grand Hotel and has just finished his Observer photoshoot. There’s a sense of urgency in the air as he’s conducting several interviews back to back. “[I’m] busy but good,” he says, sounding exhausted but smiling widely.
We are on the call to talk about Wiley’s move into landscape painting for his latest show, The Prelude, which opens at the National Gallery next month. Inspired by Romantic landscapes and seascapes in the gallery’s collection by painters including Claude Lorrain, Caspar David Friedrich, JMW Turner, and Claude-Joseph Vernet, six new works (five paintings and one film) will still feature the emblematic Black figures, but the style will mark a dramatic departure from his kaleidoscopic portraits, with their lively brocade backdrops and vibrant pigments. Set in the fjords of Norway, these new paintings are muted in tone and hue. Sombre, but still arrestingly grand.
Christine Riding, head of the National Gallery’s curatorial department, believes the institution is the perfect forum for Wiley’s work. “I so admire how he draws out complex historical and contemporary issues – race, gender, identity, climate – with such power and poignancy,” she says, “while giving us the opportunity to look afresh at the gallery’s celebrated paintings.” Riding first encountered Wiley’s “exhilarating” work at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015. Determined to work with him, she led the acquisition of his Ship of Fools (2017) for the Royal Museums Greenwich, the first work by the painter to enter a UK public collection.
Wiley’s interest in remaking historical European paintings has everything to do with searching for a sense of belonging in places that feel alien. “We know that museums and institutions, like art, have to respond to the world that they’re in, in order to stay current, in order to survive, in order to correspond to the society that surrounds them,” he says. “It’s an exciting opportunity to take a stodgy old language and breathe into it the vibrant now.”
The models for the new paintings were cast on London streets. This way of working began when Wiley moved from Los Angeles to New Yorkafter finishing his studies in 2000, and began to approach strangers he met on the streets of Harlem, bringing them back into his studio and making preparatory images of them in poses they chose from an art history book. “Los Angeles is so mitigated by car culture,” he says. “In New York, everyone was in the streets. You can see how everyone is dressing and the peacocking that goes on every Saturday afternoon in Harlem. That was something I wanted to capture. It was magical to live in that new type of Black community. I thought it was really cool and translated really well to painting and portraiture specifically.”
Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Melissa Thompson, 2020. Photograph: Mark Blower/Courtesy Kehinde Wiley/ Stephen Friedman Gallery
There’s much to admire in Wiley’s flâneur tendencies – they have led him to pick up many people in places not normally classed as hotspots for model-scouting, such as Ridley Road market in Dalston, where he spotted Melissa Thompson in 2019. He painted her sitting on a Regency-style chair against a backdrop of William Morris wallpaper in a work that has now been acquired by the V&A. For the new show, he did an open call and street casting in south London. This time, instead of taking preparatory photographs of the models in his studio, he flew them to Norway and shot them in the fjords against snow-covered mountain backdrops.
Why Norway? I ask. “Mountains have always been figured and imagined as being closer to God,” he says. There are also political currents running through these images, including climate change as well as colonialism. “When we look at landscapes, we’re also thinking about domination and annexation. In my opinion, while the work is critiquing that it’s also imagining a new way of looking at the landscape in the 21st century. We have to reconsider some of the questions surrounding sustainability. Do we want to hold nature at arm’s length? We have to perhaps think about it as something a lot more fragile, a lot more vulnerable.”
Wiley was born in South Central Los Angeles in 1977. He is one of six siblings, a twin, and was raised by an African American mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, who encouraged his artistic talent. He beams at the mention of his mother. “She was a constant inspiration for me from day one, principally by leading by example,” he explains. “Her interest in languages, in linguistics, allowed me to understand both language and art as a series of systems that can be understood and dismantled.”
What seems certain is that without her sensing his talent early on, Wiley would not have had a career as an artist. “Essentially, I didn’t have a choice, I was sort of trapped into this,” he says laughing. His mother put him into Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, a public, tuition-free school, when he was 11. “I think so many kids just want to be able to be good at something, to be recognised and to be singled out as special. I was considered special for my drawings and I have held on to them, all these years later. My way of looking at the world, my way of painting was informed by the things that surrounded me.”
Photograph: Ali Smith/The Observer
Some of the things surrounding him were the objects in his mother’s thrift shop, known locally as Freddie’s Store. It sold secondhand art books, picture frames, figurines and knick-knacks and these offered Wiley his earliest encounter with creativity. “The decorative filigree on so many of the tchotchkes [trinkets] that my mom was selling when we were kids, that is a way of looking at the world that comes from someone who was part of a marginalised community,’’ he says. “The work that I ultimately made was informed by a type of empathy that comes from an outsider’s sensibility.”
At the age of 12, Wiley was sent to Russia on a free art programme for 50 American schoolchildren in a forest outside St Petersburg. The experience was transformative. “It opened my eyes to a community of artists and young people outside of what I knew in South Central. It represented a break from seeing what was immediately around me, and made me see that there were so many different ways to live. So many traditions to see. And so, as someone who was interested in art, I started digging directly into other histories, and seeing the histories of others as being perhaps something that belongs to me as well. So it almost created a kind of global citizen out of me.” It also made him fervently aware of his good fortune in receiving a creative education. He saw that the arts could give young people, especially those from under-served communities, “not only a creative outlet, but also a sense of mastery in the world … a confidence and grace that come from being able to fast-form your ideas into objects, into words, statements, images. That shouldn’t be for the privileged, that should be for the people.”
As a youngster, Wiley would visit the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens collection in San Marino, California (the museum recently commissioned him to reimagine a 1770 painting by Gainsborough in their collection, Blue Boy). He recalls they had a great repository of British portraiture, but it was Kerry James Marshall’s De Style(1993), which depicts a scene at a barber shop, that really took hold of his imagination. “There was something absolutely heroic and fascinating about being able to feel a certain relationship to the institution,” he has said. “The fact that these people happen to look like me on some level.”
Winter Landscape, 1811, by Caspar David Friedrich, one of the Romantic landscapes in the National Gallery’s collection that have inspired Wiley’s new work. Photograph: Publicity image
Museums, says Wiley, need to appeal to all of society. “Their number one goal is to look at culture and society, and to say: this is our best. This is what we stand for. This is what we as a civilisation choose to put out there for eternity. And what happens when that responsibility is expanded to include people who come from different walks of life? It enriches us all.” For a brief moment, his pride jumps out. “So far I’ve been blessed because for every one of my shows, the number of people who attend that museum skyrockets.”
Wiley oscillates between institutional and commercial exhibitions. His first solo show was in Chicago in 2002, and since then, he’s had more than 20 shows across the US from New York to Seattle. His paintings have made a lot of money – in 2020, his Portrait of Mickalene Thomas (The Coyote), 2017, broke his previous auction record, selling for $378,000 – and he has had mainstream success through several high-profile commissions (including one from Michael Jackson, who is depicted in 2010’s Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II, which Wiley started just months before the singer died). Such is the demand for his art that he has a group of assistants in a Beijing studio to help with the creation of new works. When New York magazine asked him about having a team based in China, his answer was somewhat prickly: “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen.”
It’s understandable that Wiley might prefer not to reveal the mechanics of what is essentially a profitable business. Though he isn’t the first artist to use assistants (he follows Michelangelo and Damien Hirst, to name just two), few artists want to be viewed as sales tycoons. As Anish Kapoor said: “If everything’s for sale, how is it possible to find anything that’s radical?” I ask Wiley how much an awareness of collectors and buyers seeps into his art-making. “The commercial success of the work allows the work to get that much larger and that much more exciting,” he says. “It allows me to have a bigger reach and an ability to say more complicated things in more complicated structural ways.” However, thinking too much about a work’s place in the world has its limits. “I think it’s important to strike a balance and to understand oftentimes it’s not necessary to use brute force in order to create an image that appeals.”
Wiley seems committed to giving back financially and supporting other artists. In 2019, he founded Black Rock, a residency programme based in Dakar, Senegal. Inspired by his own early experience of an international programme, it aims to give others “the ability to go outside of your own country and personal experience, allowing you to grow as a thinker, as a creator”. Some of the artists who have visited include Amsterdam-based Nigerian artist Tyna Adebowale, who portrays queer bodies, and film producer Abbesi Akhamie, whose work focuses on African and diasporan cultures and experiences.
“For many people, living and working in Africa is a complete mystery,” he explains. “To be able to work side by side with other creative people in an international context allows everyone to grow, not only African artists, but artists from all over the world”
Why does he think there’s been such a surge in interest in art and culture from Africa? “Africa is hot right now,” he says. “But Africa has been hot for hundreds of years, because of our labour pool, our mineral resources and our habitable climate, and now we’re slowly starting to realise that there are people there. People with histories, and ways of looking at themselves and traditions of beauty. Unlike a fad or something that is simply a temporary shift, this is a thing that represents a whole new way of looking, not just at Africa but at the west.”
President Barack Obama shakes hands with Kehinde Wiley at the unveiling of his portrait in Washington DC, February 2018. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Wiley was at Black Rock last year when the Black Lives Matters protests spread across America after the murder of George Floyd. The distance from the US gave him a new perspective on Black America’s impact. “I saw that what smoulders in the United States catches fire in the rest of the world as well,” he says. “You start to see the advent of social movements – End SARS [a protest against police brutality] in Nigeria, young South Indians deciding to talk about colour issues and class issues… It’s a sort of global reckoning with power imbalances, and specifically with racial imbalances.”
Wiley tells me he’s working on sculpture next, for a major show in Italy. He’s made bronze busts in the past, but it’s thrilling to imagine someone with such an established “brand” and identity exploring a new medium. His debut film work, Narrenschiff (2017), reveals Wiley’s ability to tell stories as extravagant as his paintings. A three-channel digital film, it features a group of young Black men at sea struggling to reach land. It is a metaphor for migration and social dislocation and was inspired by the idea of the “ship of fools” –an allegory for the problems that arise when political governance is not supported by expert knowledge that was very popular in European culture from the late 15th century. The new National Gallery show builds upon these themes. “A show that opens in a British museum needs to be aware of the history of empire,” says Wiley.
The models in the new landscapes are connected by African ancestry. “It was interesting to create a global narrative in this new work,” Wiley says, “so that it becomes [about] more than the motif of western European painting, but a question of what it feels like to be young and Black and alive in the 21st century.”
Though race, Blackness, and identity are clear themes in Wiley’s works, his paintings aren’t overtly political. In the past, he’s even described them as “atheists”: the last thing he wants to do is preach, he wants to give us something to celebrate. His portraits feel something like posters for Black excellence, his subjects in positions of power, idealised and commanding respect. There’s another side to the coin, though. The attempt to challenge stereotypes through fantastical aspirational imagery can sometimes feel hollow. Must Black people assimilate into white-constructed displays of regalness, wealth, authority and class in order to be seen as valuable? Can’t we be ordinary, exist in ordinary conditions, and still matter? That’s not a question Wiley is trying to answer. “I hope my work doesn’t do harm,” he once said, “but I don’t necessarily design it to do good.”
That the work has a social impact is “a good thing”, Wiley says. “But sometimes to do that so consciously doesn’t make the best work. To make the best work you have to make it intensely personal. You have to have faith in the fact that everything that you do as an artist can be seen through a political rubric.”
In the past, Wiley himself has made some not-so-subtle works that have caused controversy, most notably Judith Beheading Holofernes, a 2012 painting which depicts a tall Black woman in a long blue dress. In one hand, she holds a knife. In the other, she swings the severed head (which was the head of one of Wiley’s assistants) of a white woman. Conservative media outlets, not knowing it was a play on Caravaggio’s painting of the same name, based on the Bible story, blasted it as racist.
So what advice does he have for young Black artists, who might feel a pressure to make “timely” work that fits a cultural landscape which has a fetish for a singular (often traumatic) Black narrative? “The best way to do it is to get really small and look at the details of your life, and to zoom in and find the beauty in the mundane,” says Wiley. “The beauty in that person who was just walking by you, who the world is ignoring. That is ultimately the most personal thing you can do and one of the most political things you can do.”
