The Hip Hop and Contemporary Portrait
from National Portrait Gallery
"While graffiti is many things to many people, for us it comes down to
the infusion of color and design to an otherwise blighted and often
lifeless setting or surface. We’ve been writing graffiti for over
fifteen years: it’s a lifestyle, an addiction, a dysfunctional marriage
of secrecy and fame, for better and for worse. Some see it as an
insatiable appetite for destruction, but through this abstracted
topography we find our creative vision and achieve our self-expression." - Tim Conlon
"Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of African American men collate modern
culture with the influence of Old Masters. Incorporating a range of
vernaculars culled from art historical references, Wiley’s work melds a
fluid concept of modern culture, ranging from French Rococo to today’s
urban landscape. By collapsing history and style into a unique
contemporary vision, Wiley interrogates the notion of master painter,
“making it at once critical and complicit.” Vividly colorful and often
adorned with ornate gilded frames, Wiley’s large-scale figurative
paintings, which are illuminated with a barrage of baroque or rococo
decorative patterns, posit young black men, fashioned in urban attire,
within the field of power reminiscent of Renaissance artists such as
Tiepolo and Titian." - Kehinde Wiley
These are actual artworks that had been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. in this spring. What is different from the 'traditional portrait' that you had seen in the museum before? What is your definition of Portrait?