What I love is to be able to take the casual and turn it into something theatrical, monumental. What I’m trying to do ultimately, is to play with the language of power. The point is to use the monumental to say that we are in deep crisis.

Hands up, don’t shoot. Hands up, don’t shoot.

We’re here in the United States. We’re here in my studio in Brooklyn, talking about An Archaeology of Silence, untold stories and lives wasted. My name is Kehinde Wiley. I’m an artist. I’m a thinker. And what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is my origin story.

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, and it was during the eighties and nineties when a lot of the gang warfare was going on. It was a very beautiful and terrible time.

It was a tough, it was a tough place to grow up. You know, crime was rampant. It wasn’t unusual to have, you know, helicopters flashing into your backyard. Police were pretty much a gang of their own. You know, there was that element of the neighborhood, but that wasn’t the only story.

Kehinde was lucky to have a lot of great advocates, even from an early age.

When I first wanted to go to university, I decided to make an art gallery and to market my work and to sell it to my peers, parents, and it was through that that I was able to pay for my first years of university.

So this was my brother’s first art gallery. You’d walk inside, you’d be welcomed with hors d’oeuvres and champagne. It was a great, it was great opening. Great show.

At the San Francisco Art Institute, I became a much more effective and comfortable painter. And at Yale, I was given this buffet course of intellectual rigor.

He was making this great body of work. It was so incredible because he started thinking about the Black male.

I was the only Black kid there for my first year. Luckily, year two Mickalene Thomas shows up. And we were both on this life raft and we chose each other as a means of flotation.

And I want to bring this up because it was one of the first times for me when I looked at his work and go, “Wow, he’s doing something.”

She’s also someone who’s incredibly critical, someone who I was afraid to have in my studio when I was a student because she would get straight to the point and tell me that this was bullshit. This was bullshit. But this is wonderful.

It was a four channel video of Black men smiling. He just had this camera lingering on them. At first they’re comfortable with the idea of smiling, but then it just lingers so long that this discomfort and the act of having to smile when you don’t want to. And I remember just like watching that and just thinking, “Where’s he going to go after this?”

From Yale, I was applying to the Studio Museum in Harlem and I got a position there. It really changed my life. I was now able to go into New York City and have a studio and a small stipend so that I could eat and paint. And this was my entrée into New York.

There was one day when I was walking through the streets and I saw this mug shot that had fallen out of a police car. And it was a printed picture of this young man’s face. And it got me thinking about mug shots and about portraiture and about choice, the sense in which a mug shot was like full frontal, side and you didn't have any say in the matter, whereas all of these beautiful portraits from the past have so many different ways of picturing the self, so many different ways of adorning the self. It set up this interesting challenge for me. How can you breathe life into the mug shot? How can you breathe life into the portrait? I began inviting people from Harlem to go through my art history books, to choose from royal and aristocratic portraits, and to say to me how they wanted to be pictured.

Protesters have taken to the streets across America, outraged over the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.

The birth of this 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 started digging into religious pictures of the fallen Christ, slain soldiers, things that are not erect, postures of domination, but rather the way that we over time have evolved a language of the sacred. An Archeology of Silence gets its title from Foucault’s writing about power.

He’s talking about, obviously, the silence of those people who aren’t here to tell their stories.

What I’m trying to do is to unearth a full picture of what it means to be laid bare, to be laid prone.

You’ll see the sculptures having these tendrils, these vines, slowly continuing the act of living. There’s a resistance in it, the recognition of the slaughter and the terrible history, but also an insistence upon being. 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 the brands that they wear, their hairstyles, all of these kind of 21st-century markers of who I am, what I enjoyed, what my taste was. Sort of really filling the lungs of the individual rather than just painting a two-dimensional picture of a moment or political crisis. There’s so many opportunities now to talk about lost potential as a means to create a scaffolding for a better future. We have to be able to go back and dig out some of those stories that were not necessarily told or given light to, so that we can point light to where we want to move to.

Oftentimes, I read, “Kehinde’s work reference master paintings.” I think that’s actually wrong. I think Kehinde Wiley has mastered master paintings and I think he has used those tropes within master paintings to really disrupt and bring socially an impact of the Black male body.

I mean, I’m biased, but I think it’s some of his strongest work. I’ve just never seen people respond so raw.

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 to speak that loudly to the population, to be able not to just create a political statement, but to create a much more personal, poetic, spiritual one 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.