Art Analysis: Kehinde Wiley

William H. Johnson was a successful painter who was born on March 18, 1901 in Florence, South Carolina. Johnson began exploring his level of creativity as a child, and it only amplified from there because he discovered that he wanted to be an artist. After making this discovery he attended the National Academy of Design in New York which is where he met his mentor Charles Webster Hawthorne who had a strong influential impact on Johnson. Once Johnson graduated he moved to Paris where he was exposed to different artists, various artistic abilities, and evolutionary creations. Throughout Johnson’s time in Paris he grew as an artist, and adapted a “folk” style where he used lively colors and flat figures. Johnson used the “folk” style to express the experience of most African-Americans during the years of the 1930s and 1940s.

One the most distinguished artists of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City and spnt part of his child hood in Pennsylvania. After his parents split up in 1924, he went with his mother and siblings to New York, settling in Harlem. "He trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the New York Public Library's 113 5th Street branch. Younger than the artists and writers who took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Lawrence was also at an angle to them: he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks - the Noble Negroes in Art Deco guise - that tended to be produced as an antidote to the toxic racist stereotypes with which white popular culture had flooded

Jacob Lawrence was an African American painter, who was known for his portraits of the African American life. He was best known for his series titled, the Migration. Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 7th of 1917. After his parents separated, Lawrence and his younger siblings were put into the foster care system until his mother could support her children in New York. His education into the world of art was not only formal, but informal as well. It was formal because he learned from after-school community workshops at Utopia House and later at the Harlem Art Workshop. However, it was informal because he could observe the rhythms and activity of the streets of Harlem. Not only was he a painter but he was active as a teacher, in contrast Lawrence was active as both a painter and art educator. In 1946, he began teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and would go on to teach at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1971, Lawrence became a professor of painting at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Later on in his career, he was also known for his serigraphs (silkscreens), many of them versions of series of paintings completed in earlier years, as well as for his book illustrations. Lawrence was still drawing and painting in preparation for still another series of works when he died in Seattle in 2000.” (Capozzola)

Kehinde Wiley’s early works were of people he pulled off the streets of Harlem. His art blurs the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of the masculinity of black and brown men. Generally, western art has and does not focus on the narratives of people

Jacob Lawrence was born on September 17, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States.He died in his sleep on June 9, 2000, in Seattle, Washington, United States due to natural causes. Lawrence was an artist/painter. He is regarded as “one of the most acclaimed African- American artists of the twentieth century.” Jacob Lawrence should be remembered because of his skill with the paintbrush as well as his achievement in successfully depicting the struggles of African Americans. He is an inspirational figure because he had the courage and ability to criticize society through methods such as cubism. He should be honored for his contributions to modern cultural art because he took advantage of his opportunity to make art and used the chance

In America, there was a painter named Kehinde Wiley, who was born in Los Angeles, California in 1977. As a little boy, his parents knew that he wanted to become an artist. His family supported him to achieve his dream, and he went to an art school in Russia at the age of 12. He went to both San Francisco Art Institute and Yale University to pursue art. Wiley has received numerous awards such as the “Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant Recipient”, "Americans for the Arts, Young Artist Award for Artistic Excellence", "USA Network, Character Approved Award", "Canteen Magazine, Artist of the Year Award; New York City Art Teachers Association/United Federation of Teachers, Artist of the Year Award" and the “Pratt Legend Award”. His arts and studies

Notably, Kehinde Wiley’s biggest achievement today must be the National Portrait of Barack Obama will go up on the walls of Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington produced by an artist who chosen by Mr. Obama himself in the closing months of his presidency. However, years prior, Wiley had a normal start. According to the author, Wiley was born in California. He was raised primarily by his mother and shared a home with his five siblings. The author continues by describing Wiley’s first art class, “he became keenly aware

The miraculous life of Jacob Lawrence’s is said to be the most distinguished and accomplished African American Artist of his time. At a young age, Little Jacob Lawrence was introduced to art in Harlem, New York. He had always had a love for the arts, He began to develop his craft at an after-school program and further moving on to the Harlem Art Workshop then securing a scholarship to the American Artists School located in New York. He had the odds stacked against him; he further perfected his art during the great depression years which also at a time when African Americans had a harsh struggle with segregation and just trying to stay alive. His paint brush has captured everything from slave revolts to ghetto life to the destruction of the war.

In general appropriation in the art movement of postmodernism, borrows, copies, and alters preexisting images and objects to challenge traditional notions in art. In artist Kehinde Wiley newest art exhibit, “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,” he appropriate cultural images, and characters from one context and places them it in another. Using juxtaposed inversions to challenge traditional elitist, white male-dominated, “high” historical art culture. As a self-identified homosexual African American man raised in Los Angeles in the 80’s, it is evident a significant part of Kehinde Wiley artists inventions derive from his own personal experiences and beliefs. By appropriate white

Kehinde Wiley is an innovative painter who has been around since 2006. His vision is so powerful and the statement that he makes attracts the attention of countless individuals. Immediately the vibrant, luminous colors that he uses attracted me to his artwork. His portraits are so radiant that they can be

Each painting is also accompanied by a descriptive caption that has been revised by Lawrence for a national tour in 1994 and 1995. He also includes expression, cubism, and African art designs in his

The two works of art that I have chosen to analyze are 1) Jordan Casteel. Miles and JoJo. 2014. Oil on canvas, 54” x 72” and 2) Aaron Fowler. He Was. 2015. Mixed media, 134” x 165” x 108”. The themes that these works of art represent in regards to the exhibit are love, family, and pain. However, they also fall into other thematic categories. The main theme that seems to apply to both “Miles and JoJo” and “He Was” is Human Experience. Additionally, these arts differ in some ways.

The artist uses patterns o colorful light wash over a wall filled with black silhouettes of paper. It is designed with sharp lines and very defined shapes. It is approximately 37 feet wide in a gallery wall space. This makes it difficult to tell race, gender and age and so this leads a removal of bias and discrimination so the viewer is capable to se the scene for what it is. This works to challenge the racial stereotypes that area accepted.

(Dialogue Magazine) — Like the lines in her drawings, Shantell Martin’s route to notoriety has been long, winding and unique. From East London to Japan to New York. The phenomenal artist shares some insight into her journey and works.

French born 1919, 3 Decembre 1966 Oil on Canvas French Artist: Pierre Soulages has spent his entire career exploring how black paint reflects light and space by creating grand strokes on canvas with a large brush. The artist play’s on words, tones, and the history of art itself questions the lack of black participants in the recorded history of early modernism. What is the significance of the color black? Why did it inspire this artist? This addresses the question by offering the work of postwar art. Which the color black may make us think of darkness and night and possible death, for some modern and contemporary artists it has been used as a new beginning for the medium of painting. This work displays differences of Western balance symmetry