Kehinde Wiley on His Art and Its Influences

Date: Thursday, April 2, 2009
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Getty Center, Harold M. Williams Auditorium
Admission: Free; reservations required. This event is now SOLD OUT.



Stand-by visitors are welcome and may be seated in an adjacent auditorium for simulcast viewing of the lecture. Visitors with reservations who arrive less than 15 minutes before the start of the program may also be directed to the video simulcast.

Painter Kehinde Wiley, one of the foremost young artists on the world stage, reveals the artistic traditions that inform his work and discusses his current project creating monumental portraits of young black men in world cities from Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro.

About Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley hot-wires the studied attitudes and dramatic backdrops of Old Master portraits with a Day-Glo palette and a hip-hop sensibility, creating a radical artistic mash-up that has been praised as hip, provocative, and technically brilliant. By asking his subjects to assume poses found in historical paintings and sculpture, he transforms ordinary urban men into saints, kings, even Christ. Wiley blurs the boundaries between traditional and contemporary, self-consciously celebrating and subverting the propaganda of self-aggrandisement in European art.

See Kehinde Wiley's Paintings
A show of Kehinde Wiley's recent work is on view April 4–May 30, 2009, at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City.



How to Get Here
The Getty Center is located at 1200 Getty Center Drive in Los Angeles, California, approximately 12 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. See Hours, Directions, Parking for maps and driving directions.