Transcript
ABRAM JACKSON: The scale of this painting is almost overwhelming. Billboard-like. And purposely so. Enormous paintings traditionally featured rulers, battles – images that articulate power. And enormous billboards are where you often find the commercialization of Black culture. Here’s Wiley:
KEHINDE WILEY: At the leading edge of American cultural output is Hip Hop, is Black culture. Hip Hop is the idiom through which so many young people throughout the world define themselves,s or discover themselves, or try on different ways of being. Black American culture has a kind of flavor, kind of sass, a kind of groove that we know to be Hip Hop, and it's something that's found its way into my painting.
Hip Hop also has left a trace that's defined by a kind of perversion of the truth. It's a rubric through which people have sort of deposited their ideas about what it means to be Black, what it means to be male, what it means to be powerful.
ABRAM JACKSON: Wiley based this figure’s pose on a 19th century French sculpture of a woman bitten by a snake.
CLAUDIA SCHMUCKLI: He changes the gender of the figure to be the portrait of this beautiful Black man. And it goes back to his concern with the image of Black masculinity in Western culture, where he really challenges a notion of masculinity that doesn't allow any room for vulnerability. When the models are rendered on the scale of billboards, and we look at them hovering above us, really towering over us, then the idea of their suffering or their pain, or their grief, or their death is automatically catapulted into a much broader context.
ABRAM JACKSON: By the way, you may notice that many of the artworks’ titles start with the title of the piece – here, it’s “Woman bitten by a serpent”, in French – then there is another name in parentheses afterwards. That’s the name of Wiley’s model for that particular painting or sculpture. Here, it is Mamadou Gueye, who posed for this artwork, and several others. Wiley spends a lot of time in West Africa, and many of his models for the works in this show, like Gueye, are Senegalese.
When you’re done in this space, go through the doorway to your left. Our next stop will be at the largest painting in the gallery – showing a young woman lying on green grass and leaves.
Image: Kehinde Wiley (American, born 1977), “Femme Piquée par un Serpent (Mamadou Gueye),” 2022. Oil on canvas, 131 7/8 x 300 in. (335 x 762 cm), Framed: 143 5/16 x 311 x 3 15/16 in. (364 x 790 x 10 cm). Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Galerie Templon, Paris. Photo: Ugo Carmeni.
