Students in Grade 4 recently created expressive and colorful self-portraits.  Our girls began by looking at Los Angeles native and New York based visual artist, Kehinde Wiley, for inspiration.

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, 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 found throughout the world.

Wiley’s larger than life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality.

The models, dressed in their everyday clothing, are asked to assume poses found in paintings or sculptures representative of the history of their surroundings, creating a juxtaposition of the “old” inherited by the “new.”

Student self-portraits are currently on display in McKinne lounge.

To learn more about Kehinde Wiley, please visit: https://kehindewiley.com/