Quote by Kehinde Wiley: “Painting is the ultimate tool of power.”

Whoever controls how people are portrayed controls how they are perceived — and ultimately, how they are treated. Painting Black and Brown subjects in the style of classical European portraiture is a way of seizing the tools of the powerful and using them differently.

Wiley made this observation in interviews about his artistic practice during the mid-2010s, when conversations about representation in museums and the visual arts were intensifying. His portraits directly challenged the absence of Black subjects in the Western portrait tradition by placing them in its most formal conventions.

American visual artist known for his large-scale, hyper-realistic portraits of Black subjects in the style of Old Master paintings. He was commissioned to paint the official portrait of President Barack Obama in 2017, making him the first Black artist to do so for a sitting president.