Interview
Wiley grew up in South Central Los Angeles. His mom him and his twin brother to get out of the streets and to study art on the weekends. The twins went into a conservatory of art on the campus of USC.
At USC they would take field trips to the Huntington Art museum in Pasadena to study collection of 18th/19th century paintings.
Wiley “I would visit and see portraits of wealthy, powerful men with all of their possessions around them. I was looking and I wasn’t seeing people that looked like me.”
Wiley went to college at the San Francisco Art Institute, followed by graduate school at Yale University, where he studied painting.
Although his secondary education took Wiley far from South Central L.A., he remained keenly aware of the challenges faced by so many other young, urban black men. His time growning up in LA deeply influenced his art works.
His artwork challenges a longstanding tradition of showcasing the rich and powerful and flipping the narrative and showing people wearing everyday clothing. He uses historical paintings and poses the people in the same manner.
He creates “a mash-up of museum treasure and the urban life outside of its gates”
Obama
“I was looking at preëxisting images of heads of state, kings, aristocrats but nothing was working with Obama. In between shots, there was a moment where he was sitting essentially as he is here, and it felt authentic.He, from the very beginning, wanted to have a very relaxed, man-of-the-people representation.”
