Kehinde Wiley is one such artist. After earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale in 2001, Mr. Wiley, then in his mid-20s, began exhibiting his large, figurative oil-on-canvas portraits of young black men in hip-hop apparel.
With an emphasis on bright, acid colors and ghetto-fabulous outfits, Mr. Wiley’s paintings borrowed heavily from the work of an earlier Yale M.F.A., Barkley Hendricks, whose portraits coincided with the Black Power movement and the ’70s heyday of photorealist painting.
Mr. Wiley’s contribution was to push things in a more bombastic direction. Hijacking — or appropriating, to use the art world-approved term — the format of old master altarpieces and three-quarter-length portraits, he likened the notorious opulence of successful hip-hop artists to that of European aristocrats. And since most of his subjects were actually disenfranchised black and brown youths — that is, hip-hop fans rather than stars — he effectively transformed his subjects into aristocrats, at least in the world of the picture.
Mr. Wiley’s work hasn’t changed much over the last decade, although his scope has gone global. A series called “The World Stage” has featured youth in Nigeria, Senegal, Brazil, China, India and Sri Lanka. Now “Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel,” at the Jewish Museum, takes on that country.
This latest leg of Mr. Wiley’s world tour starts with a portrait of a young Ethiopian-Israeli man, “Alios Itzhak” (2011), set against a pattern borrowed from a 19th-century Eastern European mizrah, a papercut made to be placed on a wall to indicate the direction of Jerusalem for purposes of worship. The portrait, acquired by the museum, is joined by 13 additional paintings of young men by Mr. Wiley, along with 11 historic papercuts and textile works he selected from the museum’s collection.
Like Alios Itzhak, most of the other portrait subjects are shown in their street clothes and painted against elaborate patterns from traditional Jewish art. T-shirts advertising YouTube or sportswear companies are juxtaposed with decorative motifs like lions, birds and arabesques that wrap around the figures, moving from background to foreground. The result is a fusion of Pattern and Decoration painting with figuration, a mash-up or sampling of historical styles and references.
One canvas, “Kalkidan Mashasha” (2011), does feature a hip-hop-reggae artist, who is painted in a light brown military shirt with patches depicting the Ethiopian flag and commemorating Haile Selassie, the last emperor of the Ethiopian monarchy and a deified figure in Rastafarian culture. Meanwhile, cases nearby quietly display intricately painted mizrahs and textiles from 19th-century Italy, Poland and Ukraine.
There are some good elements to this show, and some problems. On the positive side, the Jewish Museum has been in the vanguard of showing contemporary art. The exhibition provides an opportunity to exhibit the work of an African-American while celebrating the Jewish diaspora’s diversity and Israel as a “melting pot” (to quote the catalog).
And yet the show raises some difficult questions. For instance, what is the position of the Ethiopian Jew in Israeli society? The gallery installation gives the impression of Jewish culture as a seamless visual narrative, slipping faultlessly from old Europe to modern-day Tel Aviv. It also posits, particularly in a video accompanying the paintings, Israel as a haven for persecuted Ethiopian Jews.
In the catalog, however, Mr. Mashasha, who cites thinkers and activists like Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and Marcus Garvey as influences, states, “I am struggling with the issue of not becoming what I criticize, not to be racist if others are, not to perceive things simply because I’m sensitive and I’m black.”
Another question is why Mr. Wiley’s work focuses solely on young men, when many of the textiles on view were made by women, and, as the catalog informs us, one of the best-known Israelis of Ethiopian descent is a female singer named Hagit Yaso, who won last year’s edition of an Israeli show similar to “American Idol.”
Part of the answer is that Mr. Wiley has generally painted preening young men, and there is a strong homoerotic element in his work that is glossed over here.
It’s not necessary to label him as a gay artist — or an African-American one — to understand or appreciate his work. And yet this omission speaks to the way Mr. Wiley has been packaged: as a slightly titillating but not too radical artist whose work nods toward racial and sexual taboos, but is safe enough to be shown just about anywhere. (This is reflected in the paintings themselves, which look particularly bland and factory-produced when viewed up close.)
Perhaps the greater problem is that Mr. Wiley’s work gains its currency by leaning on hip-hop for cultural authenticity, but veers away from what gives that medium its extraordinary power. In Mr. Wiley’s hands, one of the most vital and viral idioms of the last quarter-century becomes safe and palatable, a domestic product that has been successfully exported around the globe and re-enters American art as fashion or style, largely stripped of its political and emotional charge and dressed up with extraneous decorative motifs.
Just as music critics have complained of hip-hop’s becoming a corporatized global commodity, Mr. Wiley can be accused of using it to neutralize differences and difficulties like those cited by Mr. Mashasha in the catalog. And it is those very difficulties that we rely on art to broach.
“Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel” continues through July 29 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.
via nytimes.com