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Kehinde Wiley Can’t Believe This Is Happening to Him
He built an empire out of painting young Black men into art history. Can it survive accusations of sexual assault?
Through tears, he silently flipped through a series of posters — like that part in Love Actually — on which he’d written, in capital letters, I KNOW MY LIFE WILL CHANGE 4EVER AFTER I SHARE THIS, BUT IT’S TIME TO COME TO THE LIGHT / A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED (SEVERELY) / BY A SEMINAL FIGURE IN THE ART WORLD, SOMEONE I LONG ADMIRED WHOSE WORK IS RECOGNIZED IN MAJOR MUSEUMS ACROSS THE GLOBE. His paintings have been acquired by hundreds of museums, as well as by celebrities and prominent art collectors including Elton John, Spike Lee, Venus Williams, Don and Mera Rubell, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, Alicia Keys, and Swizz Beatz. In recent years, Wiley has experimented with even more grandiose scale and materials: equestrian statues in the style of Confederate war memorials, lifeless bronze figures reminiscent of imagery from police shootings, stained-glass windows of Black people in high-tops and puffy jackets assuming the postures of saints.
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