Digesting Kehinde Wiley

“YAAAAS! Yaaaaas! This is the beeesst. So perfect!” A short, stocky girl with a buzzed head exclaimed as she passed by me. She grabbed her friend’s arm in excitement as they gazed up at a giant framed painting depicting a majestic black woman holding a bloody knife in one hand and the severed head of a white woman in the other.

Judith Beheading Holofernes. A portrait worth a thousand words. I remember doing a Google search of Kehinde sometime in the past 2 years. Coming across a photo of this same painting, it quickly became one of my favorites. Especially since I was already a fan of Artemisia Gentileschi’s version, so wrought with emotion and personal meaning to the artist. Wiley’s depiction is also very heavy, weighed down with levels upon levels of meaning. I had imbued this painting with so much of my own personal angst when I first saw that digital copy. And yet.

I felt so conflicted coming upon it in person for the first time. The aforementioned buzz cut girl, loudly shouting her approval of this painting — a painting that had previously made me feel so many things at once — was white. This fact, along with the not-insignificant number of white people in attendance taking ironic! cool! so tight! selfies with larger-than-life depictions of mostly black men was — and I don’t admit this lightly — kind of a bummer.

This isn’t something that is easy for me to write. Not because I feel guilty, but perhaps because I haven’t been in enough museum situations in which the behavior and mere presence of the people around me actually effects the way that I receive (or don’t) the art on the walls. Like, I’m just not used to all these fucking extra feelings, man. I go see art in person so that the art can tell me things. Things that the artist can only communicate effectively through their art. These are feelings that I want, and happily digest. What then, are these new feelings? This isn’t meant to be a provocative essay or a compelling think-piece. This is literally just me parsing my thoughts. Processing.

I meet one of my favorite paintings in person for the first time, a painting that I had, up to this point, felt quite strongly about. But I felt nothing. I felt nothing as I walked up to it (except recognition) and when that girl walked in front of me and professed her own love for it, I felt nothing. Or, maybe I felt a bit annoyed. Like, I’m not going to say that I rolled my eyes, but I can say that internally I sighed. Deeply.

So at this point I realize that I am here at this art exhibit having new, confusing feelings and my husband turns to me and asks, ‘What’s wrong? You don’t seem to be interested in looking at anything.’ I sort of felt defensive, like, yeah well maybe there are just so many people and it’s hard to focus, you know? I said something like, ‘We’ll have to come back another day when there are fewer people.’ But even as I said it I felt in my heart that another visit to this particular exhibit just wasn’t in me. I don’t want to come back.

Tonight was the night for me to get what I wanted from this particular Kehinde Wiley show, which was what I assumed everyone else came for: the spectacle.

Wiley’s A New Republic opened this past First Friday in downtown Phoenix. The museum was open to the public until 10pm and admission was free for everything but the Kehinde show, which was $5. Needless to say it was packed to the gills. There was an air of excitement in the room; everyone felt very engaged. Some of that palpable crowd expectation was gratified when, all of a sudden the sound of a saxophone rose above the din of voices. I turned away from a vibrant stained glass painting depicting a man in a denim vest and looked in the direction that everyone’s glowing screens were pointing.

A procession. Women with natural hair, locked together, literally, by one giant lock of hair between the three of them. Behind them followed others, men and women in black or beige, walking as if down the altar to their expectant groom. Open mouthed, many of us followed the group of a dozen or so figures, silently (minus the guy with the sax trailing them) making their way around the crowded gallery. Phones out, thumbs ready, I seethed internally at the bevy of conflicted emotions bubbling up inside of me, once again. I, too, got out my camera and stayed at the ready, aware of when the group would pass by me again so I could capture…what? The perfect moment for Instagram? #KehindeWiley #yaaaas #queens

I tried to take a Boomerang video, alas, There Is Not Enough Storage.

And this is when I expressed something to my husband. “I hate this. The spectacle of it all, and the fact that I’m totally participating in it even though it annoys me.”

“Stop then.” He replied.

I turned away from where the procession had stopped, standing in front of a giant painting of a black man atop a horse, staring back out at the crowd. What now? I began photographing the crowd interacting with the art. If I can’t engage with the stuff on the walls, well, I’ll engage my own frustration, my confusion, through photography and words. My art. Hence me writing these paragraphs of #allthefeelings that, as of right now have no neat conclusion.

Later, on the couch at home, I had already mostly forgotten my overall disappointment with the show, and the art itself. My husband turned to me and asked how I felt about it. I sort of stumbled through an explanation, processing the meaning of my words as they came tumbling out of me. “Well, I guess maybe I just have really high expectations of how black artists exist in and participate with the art world. And maybe it’s okay that all of Kehinde’s portraits aren’t some staggeringly profound statement to me. Maybe it’s okay that they sort of fit comfortably within the accepted visual language of how we understand black bodies today. Like, I like that he exists and makes art and he doesn’t have to do everything in a way that I agree with for me to still support him being outchea. You know?”

So yeah. I didn’t really enjoy seeing Kehinde Wiley’s A New Republic exhibition. And despite the number of paragraphs above, I still can’t really articulate why. Yet, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the very visceral reaction I had earlier this year, walking through a room in Phoenix Art Museum filled with religious, centuries old paintings and seeing, to my surprise, a portrait of a modern young black man modeled in the style of 15th century artist Hans Memling. Quietly and powerfully subverting the years and years of art history surrounding it. Perhaps, for me, it’s all about context. Digesting things at the right time and in the right place.