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The New York Public Library

 

presents

 

An Artist Dialogue Series Event

 

A New Republic

 

Kehinde Wiley

 in conversation with

Eugenie Tsai

   

Wednesday April 8, 2015

6:00 p.m.

 

Celeste Auditorium

South Court, Lower Level

 

The New York Public Library

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

5^th Avenue at 42^nd Street

New York, NY 10016

917-275-6975

 www.nypl.org

(directions)

 

Auditorium doors open to the public at 5:30 p.m.

All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation

 

In celebration of Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, a major exhibition of Wiley’s signature paintings and sculptures, the artist discusses his work over his prolific fourteen-year career with Eugenie Tsai, the John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art at Brooklyn Museum.

 

Accompanying this important exhibition is the gorgeously illustrated catalogue, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, which surveys Kehinde Wiley’s career from 2001 to the present. Filled with reproductions of Wiley’s bold, colorful, and monumental work, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic encompasses the artist’s various series of paintings as well as his sculptural work—which boldly explore ideas about race, power, and tradition. It includes early portraits of the men Wiley observed on Harlem’s streets, and which laid the foundation for his acclaimed reworkings of Old Master paintings by Titian, van Dyke, Manet, and others, in which he replaces historical subjects with young African American men in contemporary attire: puffy jackets, sneakers, hoodies, and baseball caps. Also included is a selection from Wiley’s ongoing World Stage project; several of his enormous Down paintings; striking male portrait busts in bronze; and examples from the artist’s new series of stained-glass windows. Accompanying the illustrations are essays that introduce readers to the arc of Wiley’s career, its critical reception, and ongoing evolution.

 

Copies of ​​Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic​ ​​(Prestel, 2015) and also ​​Kehinde Wiley (Rizzoli, 2012) are available for purchase and signing at the end of event.

 

Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, and Ingres, among others, Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban, black and brown men and women found throughout the world.  By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, history, wealth and prestige to the subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, the subjects and stylistic references for his paintings are juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery. He holds a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and MFA from Yale University and his paintings are in the collections of over forty museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Brooklyn Museum of Art. 

 

Eugenie Tsai joined the Brooklyn Museum in the fall of 2007 as John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art. Previously she was Director of Curatorial Affairs at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York. Prior to Joining P.S.1 in 2005, she was an independent curator with projects for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Berkeley Museum; and the Princeton University Art Museum. She held several positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art prior to becoming Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs. Among the exhibitions and installations she has organized are the mid-career survey Threshold: Byron Kim, 1990-2004; Robert Smithson, which received the International Association of Art Critics’ first place award for the best monographic exhibition of 2005; and for Princeton University, Shuffling the Deck: The Collection Reconsidered. Dr. Tsai received a B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

 

Initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni in 2004, Artist Dialogues Series provide an open forum for understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. Artists are paired with critics, curators, gallerists, writers or other artists to converse about art and the potential of exploring new ideas.

 

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