Kehinde Wiley is an American painter, born in Los Angeles on February 28, 1977, who puts young Black men and women into the heroic poses of European kings, generals and saints.
He became widely known in 2018, when he painted Barack Obama's official portrait and seated the president in front of a wall of leaves and flowers.
He is also the artist behind Rumors of War, a giant bronze horseman raised in Richmond, Virginia, in reply to the city's Confederate monuments.
The choice of painter was Obama's own, and he still had a warning for the artist. At the unveiling he joked: "I had to explain that I've got enough political problems without you making me look like Napoleon."
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The joke had a target. In 2005 Wiley had painted Napoleon himself, or rather a famous picture of him, Jacques-Louis David's canvas of the emperor crossing the Alps on a rearing horse. Wiley kept its composition and called his version Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps.
The first change is the rider. In the saddle Wiley sets a young Black man in camouflage pants, a T-shirt and Timberland work boots, on a canvas nine feet square.
David had carved names into the rock under the horse, those of Napoleon and of earlier conquerors who crossed the Alps, Hannibal and Charlemagne. Wiley keeps them and adds the model's own last name, WILLIAMS.
He also removes the landscape. David's hazy blue sky becomes a flat red ground covered in gold flowers, like an ornate wallpaper behind the horse. At the top of the gold frame, a small self-portrait shows the painter being born, emerging from a womb.
Obama knew about this taste for ornament. He said that Wiley tends to put people "in these elaborate settings," and that he asked the painter to "bring it down just a touch."
The man who borrows the settings of emperors grew up far from any palace, in South Central Los Angeles, with a twin brother. Their father, a Nigerian student who had come to the United States on a scholarship, went home after his studies.
Their mother raised the children alone and sent them to art classes. At eleven, the twins were chosen with a group of American children to study painting near Leningrad, in what was then the Soviet Union.
At twenty, Wiley traveled to Nigeria to look for his father. He found him at the University of Calabar, where he had become head of the architecture department. Wiley has never talked about their meeting.
Back in the United States, he earned a master's degree at Yale in 2001. He then joined the artist residency of the Studio Museum in Harlem, a museum devoted to artists of African descent, in the New York neighborhood at the heart of Black American culture.
There, a piece of paper picked up on a street changed how he chose his subjects.
A rap sheet in Harlem
The paper was a crumpled police rap sheet, the record of a person's arrests, and on it Wiley found a young man's mugshot…
What You'll Discover
The sheet of paper he found in Harlem.
Where he went to find new sitters.
Why he dressed women in couture.
What the flowers behind Obama mean.
Which general his horseman answers.
What his fallen figures are copied from.