Kehinde Wiley—the iconic American artist and presidential portraitist—is known for his work that juxtaposes art-historical traditions with contemporary culture by using the visual rhetoric of the heroic, the powerful, the majestic, and the sublime to shine a spotlight on people of color. Through a creative reimagining of grand portraiture, with all its associations of aristocracy and power, Wiley exposes the societal blind spots that permeate our art and culture and celebrates those whose identities have long been marginalized. He is a 2001 graduate of the Yale School of Art.

One of six children, Wiley was born and raised in Los Angeles. At age eleven he and his twin brother began taking art classes at a local conservatory, and a year later they traveled to Russia for a summer arts exchange. He graduated from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and earned a bachelor of fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 before pursuing his M.F.A. at Yale. Soon after completing his graduate degree, during an artist’s residency in Harlem, Wiley began to develop his signature style and process. He was struck by the sight of a mugshot of a young African American man—a portrait of a sort, but one beyond the control of the person being depicted. From that inspiration, Wiley developed a collaborative approach to his paintings, inviting people he encountered on the street to be his subjects and including them in decisions about the historical works on which their portraits would be modeled.

“Take time to throw yourself into work that you think no one but you is interested in. Try to work without thinking about being seen or having any expectation of adulation.”

Today, Wiley’s oeuvre exerts a global influence, and he divides his time between the United States and Africa, where is the founder of Black Rock Senegal, a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program he established in 2019. Wiley, the son of a Yoruba father from Nigeria, first traveled to the African continent as a student in 1997. During a stopover in Dakar he felt an immediate affinity for Senegalese culture and traditions. Decades later he selected the city as the home of his residency complex, which he named for the volcanic rock of the surrounding coast. In providing opportunities to create art outside the western context, the space, Wiley says, is “the direct answer to my desire to have an uncontested relationship with Africa, the filling in of a large void that I share with many African Americans.”

In 2018 Wiley became the first African American artist to paint an official U.S. presidential portrait, and his portrayal of Barack Obama is now displayed in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. That year he was awarded Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal and named by TIME magazine as one of its 100 Most Influential People. Among other honors, Wiley has received the Brooklyn Museum’s Asher B. Durand Award for Artistic Achievement (2014), the U.S. Department of State’s Medal of Arts (2015), and France’s Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (2020). He has held solo exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, and his works are included in the collections of more than sixty public institutions around the world. His monumental portrait of the British-born artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—based on a late-eighteenth century hunting portrait—was co-acquired by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery in 2021.

Wiley lives and works in Dakar, Lagos, and New York.