Customer Reviews

Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage Brazil

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Beleza Pura!
Without a doubt a wonderful experience to look at the work of someone and see their talent, skill and creativity all come together to make you want to look and look and look and look and come back later for more.
Nuff said...Ashe, Ache, Axe'
Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage Brazil

I will keep this review short and sweet considering I like to be long-winded and might go on a tangent about how Kehinde Wiley is a great artist. But to restate a fact, Kehinde Wiley is a terrific artist, I respect him and I enjoy looking at his artwork, which is why I wanted to purchase this book. When I received this book, I was a little bit disappointed in the size or thickness of the book, I felt that it was too short. The painting in the book were great but I felt that I could have just kept my money and searched through the internet and enjoy his works from Brazil. I felt that it's not worth the money to spend on this book considering it's extremely short and thinner than I thought it was. As stated before, I could have saved my money and just rummaged through tumblr, flickr or a random google search. This book was okay and I recommend it to people who are an avid fan of Wiley and love to keep his pieces on hand in something tangible. If you are not one of those people and just want to see what Wiley's artwork is all about then I suggest you save your money and google search his artworks.

For someone searching for large images of Kehinde Wiley's work, this is a great buy. I also love how the images of his sources are juxtaposed with Wiley's paintings. I'm an artist who doesn't usually read the text, so no review there. The images are incredible!

Love the work. What an intriguing idea to use the paintings of the great masters. You can really see the "tude" in the expressions of his models!

Kehinde Wiley is an African American artist whose childhood in the notoriously gang and crime ridden South Central Los Angeles served as the stimulus for his investigating the world through art, a journey that has taken him to studies at Yale University and on to his current home base in New York City. With the artistic progress of Kehinde Wiley comes a profound respect for the grand portraiture of the past, the portraits of famous, powerful and wealthy men painted by the likes of Gainsborough, Titian, Reynolds, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Holbein, Eakins and others. Wiley's obsession, so obvious in his majestic paintings, is to bring that same degree of dignity to the neglected African American male, placing his own heritage on the degree of celebration that has been history's realm of the White Man. In this excellent book published by Roberts & Tilton many of his strongest portraits are well reproduced and enhanced by fine essays by both Brian Keith Jackson and Kimberly Cleveland. And in keeping with the view of this book, both essays are translated into Portuguese.

Wiley's father returned to his native Africa before the birth of his son, and the need to find his identity resulted in his traveling to Africa at age twenty to finally meet his father, to define his roots. This transforming moment resulted in Wiley's beginning to concentrate on portraiture, not only as a means of understanding his father but also as a process of learning how to reproduce the intimacy that the face and body stance communicates. Once Kehinde Wiley gained recognition and honor for his portraits of the African America male, often responding to the famous portraits of history by substituting Black men in the poses of those portraits, his attention expanded to his current and ongoing project The World Stage in which he travels to Africa, China, and Brazil and other countries where he elevates the pictorial role of men of color to the same level of dignity once the constricting arena of history's White Man. The resultant portraits of black men are grand, richly colorful and decorated images of men in contemporary clothing in the swagger and stance of the proud man posing for an artist who appreciates their rising place in the globalization or unity of mankind.

Wiley's models' eyes engage the viewer, requesting/demanding respect, engendering a sensuous presence of proud masculinity against a background of wildly floral elements: the contrast is pungent. As he grows more confident as an artist, the direct quotations of past historical portraiture appear less often, evidence that the majesty of his chosen subjects is sufficient to relay the Aristotelian 'true reality'. ('The aim of Art is to present not the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance; for this, not the external manner and detail, constitutes true reality.' Aristotle) While Kehinde Wiley is only one of the numerous highly gifted and successful black artists painting today, he is particularly important not only for his enormous gifts as a polished craftsman as a portrait artist, but also for his commitment to address inequalities of the past. Metaphorically, he is beginning to put some chronic misperceptions to rest. Grady Harp, January 10