A Night of Hip Hop at NPG, Thursday July 24

Please join us on Thursday, July 24, for a series of hip hop themed events at the National Portrait Gallery in celebration of the exhibition "RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture." WKYS (93.9) FM's DJ EZ Street starts spinning tunes in the Kogod Courtyard at 2pm, and a cash bar opens at 5pm. At 7pm there will be a free screening of DJ Spooky’s film New York is Now, featuring a discussion with the artist moderated by Martin Irvine immediately following.

The night also includes a 6pm Face-to-Face talk by guest co-curator Jobyl A. Boone, about Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Ice-T (shown at right) in “RECOGNIZE!.” This portrait is part of a group of portraits originally commissioned from Wiley as part of VH1’s 2005 Hip Hop Honors awards show. The exhibition features four of the six VH1 Hip Hop Honors awardees from that year, as well as two other recent portraits by the artist.

In February, NPG curator Brandon Fortune had the opportunity to sit down with Kehinde Wiley, and ask him some questions. You can listen to the complete interview, and see more portraits by Kehinde Wiley here.  

KW: I completed the Hip Hop Honors body of work in 2005, and that commission came as a bit of a different part of my practice.  Generally what I try to do with my practice is to find models from the street—complete strangers who don’t necessarily fall into that typical portrait sitting-set. Which is to say that most of the great portraits from the past that I really admire in paintings have to do with people who are very powerful and wealthy, and who use the portrait as a very important social occasion of having their picture put down in time. 

In my work I’m actually taking very chance moments, and turning that into a heroic moment—taking possibly the complete opposite of what those original works were based on, and turning an entire lifetime of power and dominance in world in on its face, and actually taking an entire moment of absolute chance and making that the big picture.  

When I was invited to do the Hip Hop Honors paintings, it was opportunity to move almost in a different direction, but I think in the same direction in some really crucial ways. By using the language of portraiture and the way that has evolved over time, into how to describe someone heroic and how to describe someone powerful—and then taking possibly the most celebrated individuals in black American popular culture—I’m allowing the language of heroicism to then be drawn in that idiom.

BF: How has the culture of hip hop impacted you and your art?

KW: The culture of hip hop is something that ‘s impossible ultimately to define. I recently have been doing a number of trips to in some ways take the cultural temperature of black American presence through out the world.  And you see it responded to in places like Brazil—in places like West Africa, Turkey, China, India, Thailand—all of which I’ve spent time this summer simply going through and asking these sorts of questions surrounding black American culture and its presence in the world.

And what I have seen, so increasingly, is that black American culture is as varied globally as it is right here at home.  And so when I try to create a response to a question around what hip hop is, and how it fits into my personal practice, it’s global.  And that’s one of the reasons why you see my shows having characters of all corners of the globe.

I’m embracing the fullness of a culture that began as political act, an act of reformation and confirmation of who we are in the world—in the South Bronx, in the 70s.  And now its gone on so successfully that you’ll be in the streets of Tokyo and Dakar and see elements of that reverberated.

BF: What’s next for you on the exhibition schedule?  Could you share that with us?

KW: This coming fall, and this summer actually, I’ll be launching the first of my West Africa paintings.  I’ve created a new series of paintings that has me traveling across the world, looking at world culture, youth culture—a demographic between the ages of 18 – 35.  A very specific group that’s consumed with American consumption, that’s consumed with the fabrication of American popular culture, that’s consumed with the absence of painting as a dominate language within popular culture. 

And what I’m trying to do is to go to places like Dakar in Senegal, places like Lagos in Nigeria. Increasingly, I’m looking at models within that demographic and asking them to choose their favorite moments art-historically, to have them monumentalized in paintings.  That show opens this summer at the Studio Museum in Harlem.