Removal of a ‘Woke’ Painting Signals a New Line of Attack on Artists

The Trump administration has made a canny but alarming decision to attack the work of artist Kehinde Wiley. Earlier this month, Leah Campos, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, posted an Instagram video showing the removal from the embassy in Santo Domingo of one of Wiley’s paintings. In comments accompanying the video, Campos said, “Under the Trump administration and my leadership, we are leaving behind globalist, ‘woke’ ideologies.”

The head of the State Department’s Art in Embassies program, Erin Scavino, then followed with an interview on the “Sean Spicer Show,” calling the painting not just “woke” but “aesthetically terrifying.” The department, in a statement, said it would look to sell the painting, if possible.

But by choosing Wiley as the opening act in what may be a systematic effort to deaccession art from official government collections, the administration has chosen an artist whose work has become formulaic and clichéd, who has made comments that can easily be parodied as reverse racism, and who has been accused of sexual misconduct and assault by multiple people (accusations he denies). Since the 2018 unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery of Wiley’s official portrait of Barack Obama, the artist has built a wide, popular audience, and he has successfully turned his art into a reliable brand of marketable kitsch. He favors large-scale canvases with floral or patterned backgrounds (painted with industrial precision by his factory assistants), with human figures rendered from photographs, often in poses that recall famous works from the Renaissance through the 19th century.

Like other artists of his generation, Wiley began with an important insight: If people of color were to be present in museums and galleries, they would need to represent themselves as both the subject and makers of art. Wiley made a splash with heroically scaled paintings that put young men he recruited from the street, dressed in their ordinary streetwear, into sumptuous paintings that recalled heroic portraits (famously of Napoleon) or the classic poses of aristocratic portraiture. These were successful, and he never looked back. Or forward, or sideways. He had found his brand, and he stuck to it, and museums and wealthy collectors around the world responded with the herdlike logic of boutique thinking: We must have one to make our collection complete.

And now critics, and anyone else who cares about artistic freedom and free expression, will be forced to defend Wiley’s work not because it is good, but because the attacks on it are scurrilous. {snip}

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