Kehinde Wiley’s pandemic-era paintings come to MFAH

A new exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston features works by celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley that were conceived during the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and as the world was coping with the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The show, called “An Archeology of Silence,” features 26 paintings and sculptures made over the last three years. It debuted at the Fine Arts Museum San Francisco before traveling to Houston. The exhibition runs from Nov. 19 through May 27.

Wiley skyrocketed to fame in 2017 when he was asked to paint the official portrait of President Barack Obama that now hangs alongside other presidents in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. That painting, along with Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama, visited the MFAH in 2022. Both Wiley and Sherald were the first Black artists to paint an American president’s portrait and a first lady’s portrait, respectively.

But even before then, art lovers celebrated Wiley for his style of reinterpreting classical paintings and motifs with modern Black models, who were usually cast off the street and painted in whatever clothes they were wearing at the time. Another work of his, “Judith and Holofernes” was on display at the MFAH earlier this year, alongside the 400-year-old painting of the same name that inspired Wiley’s work.

Wiley grew up in South Los Angeles, in a large family with a single mother who was determined to keep her kids out of trouble. As a child, he spent many hours in the galleries of the Huntington Art Museum in San Marino, where he became obsessed with 18th-century portraiture.

“It struck me as being both extremely seductive and I felt there was a sense of impenetrable class and leisure that I didn’t have access to,” Wiley said during a talk with MFAH director Gary Tinterow at the museum on Nov. 14.

Knowing that such portraits—of kings, generals, royals and aristocrats, often surrounded by objects of wealth and power—were meant to express ideas of control, dominance and military fortitude, he wanted to recreate such imagery, only using everyday models off the street as a way to “disrupt notions of taste and class,” he said.

His source portraits signal a lust for power, dominance and respectability, he said. “I’m just turning that power towards people who look like me.”

In 2007, after years of making monumental paintings in which his subjects were standing in domineering and upright “power poses,” he decided to shift his work to depict figures in repose. That series, called “Down,” was inspired by Hans Holbein’s painting “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb,” from 1521, and featured “an unsettling series of prone bodies—some a product of the ravages of war, some contorted into erotic revelry, while others embodied the majesty and severity of entombed Saints,” according to Wiley’s website.

“That series was a real breakthrough for me,” Wiley told Tinterow during their talk.

Fast forward to 2020. While living and working at his Black Rock artist residency in Dakar, Senegal, Wiley watched along with the rest of the world over social media as the twin tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic and the death of George Floyd (and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests and marches) unfolded. Due to the pandemic, he was unable to work in his typical way of casting models off the streets of New York. Instead, he turned back to “Down” and began working again with the same source material—particularly Holbein—that had inspired that original series.

As such, “An Archeology of Silence” depicts not just the “specter of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and Brown people all over the world,” as Wiley has said, but also the forced rest and slowing down that came as the world seemingly stopped due to the pandemic, and the grief, loss and anxiety that permeated that time. The figures depicted in the exhibit are sometimes relaxed, sometimes in mourning, sometimes in ecstasy, and sometimes dead. Wiley has called the works “more tender and interior” than his previous paintings.

(The exhibit also has a special connection to the MFAH. In 2008, while working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tinterow helped acquire Wiley’s “Veiled Christ” for the museum, part of the original “Down” series.)

Merely seeing photos of the artworks in “An Archeology of Silence” does not do them justice. For one, the exhibition hall is extremely dark, with light focused only on the works, an effect that makes the paintings especially look as if lit from within. Secondly, many of the works on display are massive in scale, taking up an entire wall or gallery room. Third, each work is rendered in exquisite detail, which makes up-close and repeated viewings rewarding.

Dr. Anita Bateman, who curated the show for the MFAH, said the gallery is meant to feel chapel-like, and encourages viewers to sit with the works and the feelings they evoke.

“Wiley considers this a sacred space,” she said.

Those familiar with Wiley’s previous paintings will instantly recognize his floral backgrounds, which explode with color and sometimes seem to be growing out of the painting, a motif he uses to evoke the persistence of life. The flowers also represent the subject—the Obama painting, for example, features flowers native to Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya and Chicago, all formative places for the former president.

But sculpture is a fairly new medium for Wiley, and in this show, he works in both large scale and small to depict characters from mythology and Christianity including Morpheus, Ariadne, St. Cecelia and Hyacinth. Wiley often plays with gender, using male models for female characters and vice versa, as a commentary on notions of masculinity and femininity as well as gendered gaze.

One sculpture, inspired by Edourd Manet’s “Dead Toreador,” depicts a Black woman lying in a tomblike enclosure. Her face and hands are so lifelike the viewer almost expects to see her chest rising and falling with each breath. In her hand, she holds a cell phone, a commentary on social media and the revolution that handheld cameras have made in the capturing of police violence.

Perhaps the most breathtaking work is a massive sculpture of a young Black man draped over a horse. Made in response to the large-scale Confederacy monuments in cities like Richmond, Virginia, “Rumors of War,” unlike Wiley’s other works, does not depict a model scouted from the street. Instead, Wiley used facial recognition software to create a composite face of several men who were the victims of police shootings and other state-sanctioned violence over the previous decade. In this way, the sculpture is also a commentary on the surveillance state.

In his talk with Tinterow, Wiley likened ancient portraiture to modern social media, such as Instagram selfies, as not only a method of displaying power and wealth but also as fulfilling the basic human need of wanting to be seen.

“My job is to say that people who look like me were here too,” he said.

For Tinterow’s part, he called it “without a doubt one of the most moving exhibitions” in his decade-long tenure as director of the museum. “It’s not an exhibition that anyone can glaze over.”