130 Introduction
KEHINDE WILEY: This body of work comes as a direct response to the murder of George Floyd. During that time, so many of us had an opportunity to grieve, to reflect.
An Archeology of Silence is an archeology of untold stories and lives wasted. It's an American story about brutality and about erasure. My job is to breathe life back into that erased moment. And through that archeology, create something that's perhaps living.
TOM CAMPBELL: That was artist Kehinde Wiley. I’m Tom Campbell, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
This exhibition was premiered in Venice, Italy, last spring. It’s an absolute honor to be able to bring it for the first time to the United States, where the issues it raises are so timely and important.
ABRAM JACKSON: And I’m Abram Jackson, the Museums’ Director of Interpretation. My role is to support the museums in telling the most inclusive stories to the broadest audiences. I’m excited to accompany you on our tour of the exhibition today. We’ll be joined by the artist himself, and two other wonderful contributors who have had cause to think deeply about the questions he brings up in his work.
Let’s get started. Our next stop will be a bronze sculpture of a young man in a hoodie titled “Dying Gaul” – you’ll find it right inside the first gallery.
131 Dying Gaul, Roman 1st Century, 2022, bronze (KW22.011)
ABRAM JACKSON: Gazing downward, his arm braced on his leg, this young man embodies quiet strength. Self-possession.
It’s partly inspired by a 2000-year-old Roman sculpture. “The Dying Gaul” portrays a fallen opponent of Attalus I of Pergamon in a similar pose, showing composure in the face of death. Wiley re-envisions that sculpture in the form of a young Black man, leaving us to imagine what moment he may be confronting, with courage and fortitude.
This sculpture resonates strongly with the Reverend Wanda Johnson. Her son Oscar Grant was killed by a BART police officer, at Fruitvale Station in Oakland, in 2009.
WANDA JOHNSON: I think about Oscar's friends the night when he was on the platform, and then seeing his friends get abused by the police officer, I seen his strength. And how he seen the injustice. And he stood up, not knowing that that would be his last time to stand up. But yet willing to die for his friends, because of standing up for what was right.
ABRAM JACKSON: All the art we’ll see today was made in the last year or so. It’s a response to the murder of George Floyd, and to the state-sanctioned violence directed at so many other Black people in this country. Here’s the artist:
KEHINDE WILEY: It resonates here because this is our present. We need to be able to come to terms with so many people being slain in our streets - we have to come to terms with state power.
Each one of these losses is handled and dealt with by families and by loved ones who hopefully will carry the individual significance of those people on. But the job of my work is to be able, not to just create a political statement, but to create a much more personal, poetic, spiritual one, that talks about the humanity of all of us, that talks about the ties between those great historical, monumental European works, and some of those great historical, monumental, young Black and Brown kids who surround us every day. It's the desire to be seen, the desire to be alive, that the work is about.
ABRAM JACKSON: Our next audio stop is the oval painting nearby, of a man in a red shirt and white cap.
132 Femme piquée par un serpent (Mamadou Gueye), 2022, painting (KW-22.018)
ABRAM JACKSON: The scale of this painting is almost overwhelming. Billboard-like. And purposely so. Enormous paintings traditionally featured rulers, battles – images that articulate power. And enormous billboards are where you often find the commercialization of Black culture. Here’s Wiley:
KEHINDE WILEY: At the leading edge of American cultural output is Hip Hop, is Black culture. Hip Hop is the idiom through which so many young people throughout the world define themselves,s or discover themselves, or try on different ways of being. Black American culture has a kind of flavor, kind of sass, a kind of groove that we know to be Hip Hop, and it's something that's found its way into my painting.
Hip Hop also has left a trace that's defined by a kind of perversion of the truth. It's a rubric through which people have sort of deposited their ideas about what it means to be Black, what it means to be male, what it means to be powerful.
ABRAM JACKSON: Wiley based this figure’s pose on a 19th century French sculpture of a woman bitten by a snake.
CLAUDIA SCHMUCKLI: He changes the gender of the figure to be the portrait of this beautiful Black man. And it goes back to his concern with the image of Black masculinity in Western culture, where he really challenges a notion of masculinity that doesn't allow any room for vulnerability. When the models are rendered on the scale of billboards, and we look at them hovering above us, really towering over us, then the idea of their suffering or their pain, or their grief, or their death is automatically catapulted into a much broader context.
ABRAM JACKSON: By the way, you may notice that many of the artworks’ titles start with the title of the piece – here, it’s “Woman bitten by a serpent”, in French – then there is another name in parentheses afterwards. That’s the name of Wiley’s model for that particular painting or sculpture. Here, it is Mamadou Gueye, who posed for this artwork, and several others. Wiley spends a lot of time in West Africa, and many of his models for the works in this show, like Gueye, are Senegalese.
When you’re done in this space, go through the doorway to your left. Our next stop will be at the largest painting in the gallery – showing a young woman lying on green grass and leaves.
133 Young Tarentine II (Ndeye Fatou Mbaye), 2022, painting (KW-22.019)
ABRAM JACKSON: A 19th century French sculpture of a young woman from mythology, her long hair spreading across the waves that drowned her as she sailed to meet her future husband. That’s the melancholy origin point of this painting. Wiley posed his model in the same way and gave the painting the same title – “Young Tarentine”.
But instead of waves, he surrounds this figure with a setting that’s solid, earthly, and incredibly beautiful. Here’s Hodari Davis, Oakland-based Chief Innovation Officer of Edutainment for Equity:
HODARI DAVIS: You're seeing a body that's at rest, but you're seeing this bright life all around this body. it's somewhat of a paradox. You can't tell the difference between a body that's dead or a body that's at rest. And either way you're looking at it, it's uncomfortable, right? But why would a body at rest be uncomfortable?
KEHINDE WILEY: What I'm trying to do is to unearth a full picture of what it means to be laid bare, to be laid prone. The paintings are of people who aren't standing erect, who aren't domineering in monumental space, but there's a kind of elegy surrounding them, there's a sadness that surrounds them. But strangely, there's also kind of growth that's going on in the picture plane. There’s a desire for me to create paintings and sculptures that cradle the subject, that recognize that they’re vulnerable.
They are designed to take up space in the world, to demand presence, but they're also begging that you take them seriously as individuals. I think that's one of the reasons why I wanted to stick so heavily onto the small details of each subject in my work, to be able to look at their nails, their hairstyles, the brands that they wear, sort of really filling the lungs of the individual rather than just painting a two-dimensional picture of a moment or a political crisis.
ABRAM JACKSON: Our next audio stop is the oval painting of a man clasping his hands to his chest.
134 Christian Martyr Tarcisius (El Hadji Malick Gueye), 2022, painting (KW-22.025)
ABRAM JACKSON: The powerful use of light here draws our attention to this man’s lowered eyelids and clasped hands, making us feel we’re in the presence of intense suffering, or prayer.
CLAUDIA SCHMUCKLI: Wiley employs a piercing brightness that bathes the body in aura of sacredness, and it echoes the treatment of the divine in European painting, which has its origins in the veneration of the body of Christ.
KEHINDE WILEY: There's an important part of religious depictions of ecstasy in relationship to human suffering. So much of this is pictured through light, in a way that almost feels erotic - the sense in which the body is prone and flooded fully with this kind of divinity, this rapturous presence.
ABRAM JACKSON: Wiley looked to another kind of Christian imagery for this figure’s pose – a sculpture of a Roman boy named Tarcisius, who was killed for his faith. Both the original sculpture and this painting work to create emotion and reverence in the viewer. The parallels with the oppression of young Black men in this country are inescapable.
KEHINDE WILEY: I think that is, at its core, the central metaphor of this work: this conflict between the humanity of this subject and the brutal fact of human nature. This desire to be seen as present and fully formed, but also having been stricken down and now depicted as lost potential, as evidence of the sacred, as evidence of something beautiful that could have been.
ABRAM JACKSON: Our next audio stop is the bronze sculpture to your left – of a man lying in a wooden case.
135 The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (Babacar Mané), 2022, bronze (KW-22.016)
KEHINDE WILEY: The birth of the show starts as the world shuts down. As we see George Floyd slain in the streets of America, I get to work, I start thinking not only about this explosive moment that triggers the whole world into thinking about Black bodies in a different way, but I start thinking about imaging of bodies slain, historically. I start digging into religious pictures of the fallen Christ.
ABRAM JACKSON: The form of this sculpture was inspired by a sixteenth century painting by Hans Holbein, that Wiley first saw around fifteen years ago. The painting shows a claustrophobic view of the dead Christ – as if we’re looking into his tomb from the side. Christ’s body is both utterly ordinary, and, because we know who it is, sacred, at the same time. Wiley was blown away by that image, and gives this bronze figure a similar sense both of the everyday, and the heroic.
KEHINDE WILEY: There's a tradition around the celebration of a life that happens in religious painting, that needs to be retold. There's so many opportunities now to talk about lost potential as a means to create a scaffolding for a better future.
ABRAM JACKSON: When you’re ready to move on from this gallery, go through the doorway to your left. Our next audio stop will be the bronze sculpture of a man, in the center of the room.
136 Young Tarantine (Mamadou Gueye), 2022, bronze (KW-22.012)
ABRAM JACKSON: “Young Tarentine”. That’s the title of this sculpture – and of the billboard-size painting of a woman lying among yellow leaves that we saw earlier. You can see it all the way down at the end of the previous gallery, right from where we’re standing. Wiley’s source for both pieces was a 19th century sculpture of a woman. But as so often, he takes that theme and pose and runs with it, trying it out with different materials – and genders.
CLAUDIA SCHMUCKLI: Again, playing with the fluidity of gender, that informs a lot of how he thinks of gender construction throughout the work.
ABRAM JACKSON: Both Wiley’s paintings and his sculptures contain new life, as well as sorrow.
KEHINDE WILEY: You'll see the sculptures having these tendrils, these vines, slowly continuing the act of living. There's a resistance in it, a recognition of the slaughter and the terrible history, but also an insistence upon being.
ABRAM JACKSON: The original 19th century Tarentine sculpture was an elegy to a young woman who died too soon. Wiley’s Tarentine painting and sculpture convey a similar feeling – although of course there is a more dire cause of grief that we can imagine happening to these contemporary figures. Hodari Davis:
HODARI DAVIS: There is a dignity and sort of an honor in being remembered, in being turned into an icon. But then there's an irony to that, relative to what's happened and what's happening in San Francisco. I can't imagine anybody riding a BART to get to the de Young, and not having to walk past bodies of people who are laid in ways that are similar to what they're gonna see in the art.
And we're reminded, whether it's Tyre Nichols or George Floyd or so many others, we're reminded.
ABRAM JACKSON: The oval-shaped painting of a woman nearby is our next stop.
137 The Virgin Martyr Cecilia (Ndey Buri), 2022, painting (KW-22.017)
ABRAM JACKSON: A tender, realistic portrayal of a Roman Christian Martyr dead in her tomb was Wiley’s starting point for this figure. The artist has long been interested in experimenting with backgrounds – here, he’s decided to fill it with poppies.
KEHINDE WILEY: Historically, backgrounds have been: powerful man sitting on his land - everything's a possession. It's, the animals are my possession, the house is my possession. I decided to fill it with this decorative floral. It's the emptying out of all of that anxiety surrounding possession, and to fill it with the simple act of growing itself.
ABRAM JACKSON: The poppies’ vivid colors complement the warm highlights on the figure’s skin. Wiley, with Black American roots from his mother, and Nigerian roots from his father, has spent time in West Africa recently, and many of his models for works in this show are from Senegal.
KEHINDE WILEY: Africa's had a huge impact on my work because I go to the marketplaces and I see fabrics that are inspiring, I see colors that are inspiring, histories and botanicals that don't exist in my work before. I also see different types of Blackness that exist there.
I learned how to paint skin by using whiteness as the model through which the world is seen. There is no real tradition of painting Black skin in western easel painting and so you have to make that up yourself - that's creating a vocabulary of Blackness, a playbook of Blackness.
One of the cool things about my shows is that you start to see young Black and Brown kids showing up in the museums, as though that institution were there for them. And it should be.
ABRAM JACKSON: Once you’re finished in this space, go back through the previous gallery. As you pass the huge painting of the man in a yellow shirt, turn right. Our next stop is a painting of a woman in a red top, seated on an orange cloth.
138 The Death of Hyacinth (Ndey Buri Mboup), 2022, painting (KW-22.021)
ABRAM JACKSON: The blue and white flowers in the lower right corner of this painting clue us in to its inspiration. Wiley pulled this figure’s pose from a painting of a story from classical mythology. It’s by the 18th century Italian artist, Tiepolo. It portrays the death of Hyacinth, a young mortal transformed into flowers after his death by the god Apollo, who loved him.
Tiepolo’s painting is full of other details that Wiley chose to leave out – classical archways and statues, cherubs and gods. His interrogation of the forms, symbolism and significance of paintings by his artistic heroes goes right back to his childhood in Los Angeles.
KEHINDE WILEY: I first discovered Old Master painting when going to the Huntington Library and Gardens in Los Angeles. Those old collections had some amazing portraits of landed gentry, aristocrats, these powdered wigs and lapdogs and pearls - all of these signifiers of power that seemed so distant. But at the same time, the technical mastery of it was so good that it drew me in.
So from a very early age, I had this kind of fascination with the bombastic nature of the portraits, the unabashed, defiant sense of resplendence that they were having. They were just so proud and so bold, and so in your face, all the blinging. It really reminded me of some of the attitudes that early Hip Hop was criticized for having - the garish nature, the bombastic chest beating.
What I love about being an artist is you're able to colonize that space. You're able to enter that door and decide to rearrange the furniture. What I wanted to do was to take the language of classic Western European easel painting and to embody that language, to be able to position people who look like me within that field of power.
ABRAM JACKSON: Our next audio stop is at the bronze sculpture of a young man kneeling, his head in his hands.
139 Youth Mourning, 2022, bronze (KW-22.006)
WANDA JOHNSON: My name is Wanda Johnson. I'm the mother of Oscar Grant that was killed January 1st, 2009, at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, California.
ABRAM JACKSON: Oscar Grant was shot in the back and killed by a BART police officer that night. This sculpture, titled “Youth Mourning”, is especially resonant for his mother.
WANDA JOHNSON: When he was killed, this “Youth Mourning” was his friends. Mourning for the loss of a loved one. Mourning for the loss of a friend, mourning for the loss of a family member. Never to go back, to be able to call this person and talk to this person. Never to go back, to be able to joke and laugh and eat with this person. But now, having to face being alone.
They laid on the platform and at the hospital, mourning, all of us mourning, but having the question of why?
“Youth Mourning” seems to read: I should have peace. I should be able to live in freedom, not have to cover up who I am, being identified and targeted because of my appearance. I shouldn't have to have a hoodie on or a hat on, so that you can't see the real me.
I begin to think about how so many of our people have had so much strength and so much zeal and just different gifts and talents and abilities, but yet lose their lives senselessly. And now all those gifts, their talents, their bravery, is buried in the ground along with them.
Like this “Youth Mourning”, many mornings, many evenings, this was me. Balling up, praying unto God. Why did it have to happen? And 13, 14 years later, that question still resonates - why did you have to pull out your gun and shoot him when it wasn't necessary?
ABRAM JACKSON: When you’re done in this space, move through to the last, momentous room in the exhibition. I’ll meet you there to talk about the figure on horseback.
140 An Archaeology of Silence, 2022, bronze (KW-22.014)
ABRAM JACKSON: “An Archaeology of Silence”. Kehinde Wiley gave this title both to this monumental sculpture – and to the exhibition itself. There’s so much to think about here. Find space nearby where you’ll be comfortable for a few minutes, while we hear from the artist and Hodari Davis.
KEHINDE WILEY: The point is to use the language of the monumental to say that we are in deep crisis. You, the viewer, have to come to terms with regards to how we see the Black body. Here, it's devoid of life, yet the horse is still rearing, it's still moving.
HODARI DAVIS: It's almost like, which represents you? Are you this horse of Empire that we've seen so many times, marching over so many cities, all over the world? Or this body on the back of this horse? So many of us have been educated to see the horse. To pledge allegiance to that horse, to be proud of the accomplishments of that horse. And to actually not see this body on the back of that, actually not see it at all.
ABRAM JACKSON: The statues of Civil War generals on horseback in Richmond, Virginia, have been taken down, following protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But Wiley’s experience of them a few years earlier, caused him to think deeply about artworks that can hold so much power.
KEHINDE WILEY: They were produced oftentimes in the 1920s, 1930s, as a means of terrorizing the Black population of the South. I wanted to recreate that language - I wanted to breathe it in, and to exhale something differently.
Archeology is the act of pulling the past into the present. And I think that so much of what happened in the aftermath of the brutal murder of George Floyd has to do with us recognizing his humanity, the humanity of so many of us who happen to look like him, generations of people who've suffered under chattel slavery, and the presence of Empire.
Is it all about destruction? – No. It's certainly about human capacity to heal and to rebuild. It's about a resilience that has been our saving point for generations. My work is about creating strategies of shining. Strategies of mining terrible histories, and creating new fields of providence.
HODARI DAVIS: So, what happens when people encounter this? I know that art can make hard conversations really easy and easy conversations really difficult. That's art, right? Just it being presented to the world changes what we think about, changes how we think, changes the conversations that we would have, or wouldn't be having, if we weren't so provoked. That's the power of art.
ABRAM JACKSON: This is the last room in the exhibition, and the end of the audio tour. But it’s by no means the end of the conversation.
There are several additional resources to help make sense of this powerful exhibition, including a critical reflection space in the Piazzoni Murals Room. It’s downstairs on the first floor, right outside of Wilsey Court. There is also a short film about Kehinde Wiley’s journey and artistic process that can be accessed on the exhibition webpage.
We would like to thank all of our interviewees: the Reverend Wanda Johnson of the Oscar Grant Foundation, Hodari Davis of Edutainment for Equity, Curator Claudia Schmuckli, and the of course, the artist himself.
The audio tour is underwritten by Google.org, enabling all visitors to access it for free.
The audio tour was narrated by me, Abram Jackson. It was written and produced by Frances Homan Jue and sound design is by Dennis Hysom. Thank you for listening.
