Jeffrey Brown:
Today one of the world’s most celebrated artists in part for his 2018 portrait of Barack Obama, the 46-year old Wiley grew up in South Central Los Angeles, one of six children raised by his mother, Freddie Mae Wiley. He credits her and public tuition-free art programs, including one that sent him to Russia at age 12, for both encouraging his talents and allowing him to first see famed artworks of the past.
After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute and Yale’s Master of Fine Arts Program, he quickly became an art world star, known for putting ordinary Black men and women into the historical frame, often finding his models through what he calls street-casting, approaching people on the street to ask if he can paint them.
Wiley spent much of the pandemic in Senegal, where he’s established a studio and arts residency program. The works in an Archaeology of Silence were mostly painted there, using local residents as models.
