On 21 March 2015, actor Lupita Nyong’o, best known for her Oscar-winning debut role in 12 Years a Slave, uploaded a photograph of an exquisite artwork to her Instagram account. Painted on a dark wooden board and framed by antique-looking panels decorated with gold leaf, it features the bust of a beautiful young Black man.
Rendered in a highly realistic manner, and standing before an idealised landscape imagined in bright blues and greens, the sitter stares out of the painting with wide eyes and an enigmatic expression. Long dreadlocked hair has been pulled back from the man’s striking face, and one escaped loc falls onto his chest, creating a shadow on his simple white vest. Despite his casual appearance, the subject is resplendent: beams of golden light illuminate his bare shoulders and strong arms.
Earlier that day, Nyong’o had found this magnificent painting hanging on the traditional white walls of New York’s prestigious Brooklyn Museum. Compelled to post on her personal Instagram page, she accompanied the image with a moving poem about her visit:
I went to the #BrooklynMuseum
and what did I see?
Beautiful Black men
looking at me.
Painted by #KehindeWiley,
they were gilded and grand,
Modern images
in ancient artistic land.
There were women too,
of equal size and style,
And a video of men
showing how long they could smile.
I gasped, I sighed
and I laughed out loud,
So I hope you go see it,
it’ll make you proud.
Nyong’o had seen sixty portrait paintings and several sculptures, included in a startling show titled ‘A New Republic’ by Kehinde Wiley. The young African-American artist had portrayed contemporary Black men and women using the conventions of ‘Old Master’ European portraiture. Wiley’s sitters wore hip hop street fashions – sneakers, bandanas, baseball caps and hoodies – while adopting the heroic poses often seen in historical paintings of saints, soldiers, kings and aristocrats.
Inside the exhibition, Nyong’o found herself surrounded by huge billboard-sized canvases, in which full-length subjects brandished gold-encased swords and sat on horseback, framed by ornately patterned backgrounds and encircled by hovering cherubs. With each artwork, Wiley re-staged a famous painting from art history; in Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) a youthful Black male straddled a strong horse rearing up on its hind legs in an imposing revision of Jacques-Louis David’s nineteenth-century equestrian portrait of the French emperor.
The exhibition also included a group of eight works painted in much smaller scale, on wooden panels featuring young Black men at bust-length. In contrast to Wiley’s grand decorative portraits, these sitters had been depicted in simpler, stripped-back terms. Wearing casual clothes, without armour or accompanying angels, they were positioned before natural landscapes. Among them was the young man in After Memling’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat (2013) – the painting featured on Nyong’o’s Instagram page.
Legendary fifteenth-century artist Hans Memling inspired this artwork. The Flemish master painted portraits of men and religious figures in the manner of the triptych altarpiece; typically found in Christian art as a devotional object, it consists of three oil-on-oak panels, hinged together. Displayed open, it reveals a figure – usually the Virgin Mary or Christ – painted prominently on the central board. Once again riffing on art history, Wiley had inserted contemporary subjects into masterpieces. But who were these men?
When Nyong’o uploaded After Memling’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat to her social media page, it was soon flooded with likes and positive comments; among them, one woman wrote simply, ‘This is Souleo.’ She had recognised, and acknowledged, the young male model in the painting: Peter Wright.
Souleo, as he is known, is a native New Yorker, and has modelled for three paintings by Wiley. In Antoine, ‘The Grand Bâtard de Bourgogne’ (2011) he wears the same vest, positioned against a patterned background of red with blue birds, while in Albert and Nikolaus Rubens, the Artist’s Sons (2006) he dons a red hoodie emblazoned with the simple moniker ‘New York’. In each composition, it looks as if Souleo has casually stepped straight off the city’s streets and into the painter’s majestic compositions; and it looks this way because it’s not far from the truth.
Since the start of his career, Wiley has found many of his models while walking through New York; in fact, the first of his muses he came upon purely by chance. During the early 2000s Wiley, who had recently earned his MFA from Yale University, was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. On his way there one day, he came across a crumpled piece of paper blowing across the street; unfolding it, he realised that it was a mugshot – issued by the New York Police Department – of a young African-American man in his twenties.
Wiley took the creased image of this man back to his studio where he flattened and pinned it to the wall. It made him consider portraiture as a potent way of framing a person’s identity: ‘I began thinking about this mugshot itself as portraiture in a very perverse sense, a type of marking, a recording of one’s place in the world in time. And I began to start thinking about a lot of the portraiture that I had enjoyed from the eighteenth century and noticed the difference between the two: how one is positioned in a way that is totally outside of their control, shit down and relegated to those in power, whereas those in the other were positioning themselves in states of stately grace and self-possession.’
These reflections inspired Wiley to turn the printed mugshot into a portrait, Mugshot Study (2006). The emotive painting features the young Black man, wearing just beaded necklaces around his neck and a white tank top, and positioned above his New York State ID number: 99826970. Surrounded by a stark and symbolically white background, and tilting his head to one side to look at the viewer with wide eyes, he seems to pose a question: will this always be the way in which Black men, operating in an inherently white country, are framed?
Moreover, Wiley has softened the image of his male subject in contrast to the mugshot; light falls upon his youthful skin, highlighting the fragile V-shape of his neck and delicate structures of the collarbone. Humanising the figure from the wanted poster, Wiley presents him as a wounded boy, rather than hardened criminal. Vulnerability is a dominant theme in the work of the artist who, as an African-American man himself, understands the prejudice and powerlessness that Black people experience based on their appearance: ‘I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body, and how certain people respond to that body. This dissonance between the world that you know, and then what you mean as a symbol in public, that strange, uncanny feeling of having to adjust for… this double consciousness.’
Following the completion of Mugshot Study, featuring his first accidental muse from New York, Wiley began to paint portraits of other ordinary men from the city. However, in contrast to the earlier work, which is almost ghostly in tone, he began to use portraiture to rebuke the negative and damaging stereotypes of Black men by society; instead, he inserted African-American subjects into renowned art historical paintings, such as those seen by Nyong’o in the Brooklyn Museum, in order to hold them up as empowered heroes.
During the early 2000s, Wiley found many of his models through a method which he refers to as ‘street casting’ – he approached young Black men, aged between eighteen and thirty-five, who were passing by or hanging out on the streets of Harlem. While many refused to pose for this relatively unknown artist, suspicious of his aims, others felt excited to be ‘discovered’ by the painter and accepted the invitation to model for him, particularly when he explained his intentions.
Wiley also placed advertisements for models online, which is how he came to work with Souleo. At this time Souleo, who was studying English at Brown University, was taking on modelling jobs while aspiring to be a journalist. He remembers responding to the artist’s advert: ‘It’s a totally unromantic story – years ago I came across an ad on Craigslist for paid models and applied with a selection of my photos. I didn’t realise who the artist was. I then looked him up but had no idea how big of a deal he’d become.’
Successful in his application, Souleo was one of ‘around ten young Black men’ who were invited to spend ‘about half a day’ in the artist’s huge loft-style studio in New York, posing for photographs from which Wiley worked up his paintings. He recalls how the artist, who has always taken a collaborative approach with his models, described to the group ‘what he was trying to do’. With a long interest in art history, Wiley wanted to position his models within reworked ‘Old Master’ paintings, which he showed to them through reproductions.
Having described his intention, Wiley then invited the models to take turns posing for him on their own, under professional lights, from which he took multiple photographs. Souleo had previously modelled for commercial shoots and, although this was his first time working with an artist, he treated it in the same way: ‘I was there to perform – this was work and I wanted to do a good job.’ In modelling for the artist and his camera, Souleo recalls that the focus was on his facial expression and body language: ‘A lot of the direction was about the actual pose – he wanted a vulnerability within the image, that youthful emotion in the eyes and the way in which I was standing. There was so much attention to detail in how I held my hands and fingers – it was very precise.’
This emphasis on Souleo’s countenance and posture is evident in After Memling’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat. Wiley’s muse raises his graceful hands slightly, bringing them in front of him to dominate the foreground of the composition. Natural light catches the model’s gold ring, which gleams from one finger, illuminating and bringing attention to his soft youthful skin. At the same time, the focus is on his large eyes, directly in line with his hands, with which he looks directly and engagingly at the viewer.
There is a pointed shift in Wiley’s version from Hans Memling’s fifteenth-century masterpiece Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat (1465–70) on which it is based. The original oil-on-oak panel painting features a middle-aged white man, wearing a rounded, red wool-fabric hat and black gown, who gazes off into the distance and, although his hands are visible, they are placed to one side, rather passively. Where Memling’s sitter is contemplative, Souleo is posited as active force and involved collaborator in the portrait.
What Souleo wears – a simple white vest – is also important. Typical of the way in which Wiley works, the artist had invited his models to choose clothing from a box of street fashions, including hoodies and baseball caps, or keep their original outfits on, as in the case of Souleo. Through this method, the artist allows his subjects to be seen truthfully on their own terms; it also shows Wiley wanting to showcase ordinary African-American men, who have historically been omitted from Western museums, as both visitors and subjects of artworks hanging on their walls.
However, Souleo’s dress does also resonate with the original masterpiece on which Wiley’s work was modelled. The Flemish master was among the first to paint individuals who were not royalty, religious figures, biblical characters or members of the clergy. Instead, Memling painted portraits of an overlooked but increasingly influential sector of society: the merchant class. Memling’s pictures can, therefore, be understood to celebrate a quiet revolution of social mobility within Flemish society. Similarly, in his work Wiley focuses on ignored members of contemporary American society, who are defined not just by class, but by race. Replacing the original sitter’s hat with Souleo’s distinctive dreadlocks, the artist also brings his model’s racialised identity into the picture and, like Memling, elevates him to the status of a painted icon.
When Wiley exhibited his portrait of Souleo at ‘A New Republic’ at Brooklyn Museum, it was one of the smallest artworks on show. Exhibited alongside huge canvases of mighty Black men on horseback, it could easily have been overshadowed. However, in contrast to Wiley’s epically scaled paintings, the intimate portrait of Souleo, painted in the devotional triptych manner, requires the viewer to come close, entering into a powerfully sacred space. Locating his sitter within a gold-leaf gilded altarpiece, Wiley presents Souleo as an individual worthy of worship.
In some ways, this portrait of Souleo also recalls Wiley’s Mugshot Study: like the early muse, he has been treated with sensitivity and humanity, and the work demands contemplation from the viewer. As the artist has reflected on such portraits in an interview ahead of the museum exhibition, ‘In my work I try to slow down and see individuals. I’m standing on the shoulders of all those artists who came before me but here there’s a space for a new way of seeing black and brown bodies all over the world.’
Through his staged interventions in art history, Wiley invites audiences to share in this ‘new way of seeing’. Working with young African-American muses such as Souleo, he asks viewers to recognise the absence of Black figures in Western art, from altarpieces to mural sized masterpieces. Before collaborating with Wiley, Souleo had rarely entered into a museum or gallery beyond the occasional school trip: ‘I had no interest in the art world because there is no representation of people like me. From a Black perspective, museums are not very diverse. Kehinde definitely altered my way of thinking about the art world.’
With his artworks, Wiley also critiques the demeaning portrayal of Black masculinity in society, popular culture and art. Meaningful change often comes from within, which is exactly how Wiley operates. Inserting his subjects into masterpieces, he positions them as powerful protagonists to be seen anew. While Wiley has since gone on to paint the rich and famous, including former President Barack Obama, it is his deliberate focus on the nobility of the everyday Black man that remains his most poignant work to date.
The artist’s paintings of Black muses straight from the streets of Harlem have also taken on a sharp new relevance following the death of George Floyd, which sparked protests around the world. On 25 May 2020 the unarmed Black man died in Minneapolis after white police officer Derek Chauvin, who had just detained him, knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes – four of which he was unconscious for – as fellow officers stood by. Floyd’s death set off a series of Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and racial profiling, about which Wiley spoke out in an article published in The New York Times: ‘It’s a wake-up call to the white population in America. It’s what so many Black Americans have known and been trying to communicate for centuries. It comes as no shock or surprise to us that Black bodies are under assault on a daily basis. What comes as a shock is that so few have listened.’
In his early Mugshot Study Wiley shows viewers the assault which Black men experience, framed frequently as aggressive thugs, killers, criminals and a threat to be knelt upon. In contrast, his portraits of muses such as Souleo challenge this view of Black men. Following the death of George Floyd, murals appeared around the world featuring his face and name. One memorial in Minneapolis, near where he was murdered, lists the names of other Black lives lost to police brutality and reiterates the importance of ‘saying our names’. Similarly, in each of his portraits, Wiley inscribes the name of his model in the frame, ensuring that they are identified, valued and given recognition as individuals beyond stereotypes.
Through his creative collaboration with Wiley, Souleo has found celebratory images of him hung on museum and gallery walls, and shared on social media. Who we see represented in artworks is of huge importance – we all need to see role models who look like us – and this positive impact can only be heightened if you are the one in the painting, affirming your identity and allowing you to be truly seen.
We often consider the ways in which inspiration travels from muse to artist; but Souleo demonstrates that it also flows back from artist to muse. As he has reflected, ‘With Kehinde, I was selected, I inspired him, he saw something in me and I’m inspired by his work. I see the importance of Kehinde’s work, the mission behind it, it’s inspired me. It reminds you to create your own narrative, your own pathway.’
Since working with Wiley, Souleo has created both a powerful narrative and a pathway of his own. The painter not only opened up the art world as a space in which Souleo could enter into as a visitor, but somewhere he has also been empowered to play an active part. Staying in touch with Wiley, whom he refers to as a ‘warm and gracious man’, Souleo has been invited to the artist’s home and introduced to his connections, giving him the means and confidence to embark on his own creative career. Souleo, who now works as a curator, has featured as a model in commercial shoots, staged exhibitions and public programmes, and collaborated as a muse for numerous other photographers and artists, including his partner and creative artist, Beau McCall.
Wiley’s portraits offer audiences a new vision and narrative, within which Black men have status and grace conveyed upon them. In turn, this power and inspiration has been internalised by muses such as Souleo, evident in his successful journey into the art world as a visitor and major contributor. Today, After Memling’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat has a permanent home at Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, where it can continue to inspire new visitors – invoking in them a new way of seeing. Inspiration, as Souleo has manifested, ripples out. Moreover, his portrait shows us that Black Lives Matter.