UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology SPRING 2024 - Flipbook - Page 9
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
healing part of this experience, and it feels like we are
healing in real time.”
so painting strangers who strike him is a notion that
makes sense. The 96x72” oil on canvas is of a woman
he met in London while prepping for a 2020 exhibition
at William Morris Gallery. Some viewers have seen
this painting as a nod to Degas’ dancers, but since
Wiley has been mum about the painting beyond where
he met the model and when, there is no guarantee that
any reference to Degas was intentional.
While the 昀椀gures portrayed in this exhibition glowed
with what at 昀椀rst glance seems to be health and
youth, accompanying written materials—and even the
exhibition’s title—indicated otherwise and ensured
viewers would take pause, possibly view the 昀椀gures as
martyrs, but de昀椀nitely feel the reverberations of how,
more often than otherwise, the images our culture
holds up of Black people are those in similar poses
after an untimely death. Wiley’s work continues to be
as impeccably executed as ever, but the importance has
shifted away from re-visioning famous works; the way
a model is presented is what is fascinating, and the de
Young exhibited as many sculptures as paintings. It is
clear that the way viewers interact with Wiley’s work is
personal, independent from references to art history.
One painting that was quite intentional in re-visioning
is his A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, commissioned
by the Huntington Library to celebrate 100 years
of the aforementioned Thomas Gainsborough’s
painting, The Blue Boy, being part of the Huntington
collection. The Gainsborough painting 昀椀rst exhibited
in the U.K. as A Portrait of a Young Gentleman
in 1770 and was purchased by Henry and Arabella
Huntington in 1921. The collection it is part of formally
became the Huntington in 1928 after his death. They
undertook a major restoration of The Blue Boy in
2018 in preparation for their 100-year celebration.
Melinda McCurdy, the Huntington’s Curator of
British Art, said that although Wiley is an American
rather than European painter, “Our minds went to
Kehinde because of his longstanding comments
about how he visited the Huntington as a child and
how the collection helped inspire him to become an
artist, speci昀椀cally to work with 昀椀gural art in the Grand
Manner format.” Since The Blue Boy is such a pivotal
part of their collection, they wanted to do something
that not only celebrated the work, but also, McCurdy
said, “We wanted to make it relevant for audiences
today. Collections of historical European art don’t
often have images of people of color. This is a factor
of that type of collection, so we will use the work of
a contemporary artist to help rectify that as much as
we can.” They worked with Julie Roberts of Roberts
Projects Los Angeles to commission Wiley.
In recent years, too, producing fewer paintings that
might be directly connected to a speci昀椀c Old Masters’
work (even the painters of the Grand Manner style)
could be due to that historical reference having been
transcended, the essence of art history now more
part of Wiley’s painterly muscle memory than the
overarching or overriding purpose. His 2023 painting,
Portrait of Ya Fatu Conteh, is one such work. As
Wiley has done with re-visioning Old Masters’
paintings, he also re-visions designs and patterns
housed in museums and museum archives. Portrait of
Ya Fatu Conteh uses a 1850’s A.H. Lee & Sons design
pattern (“Hollyhock,” in the archives at the Victoria
and Albert Museum), the model’s body interacting
with the design as if it has come to life, somehow,
while still remaining two-dimensional.
Wiley “casts” his models by introducing himself to
people on the streets of cities he lives in and visits;
he believes if someone is alive in the world, they
already have something quite grand going for them,
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