Through Kehinde Wiley’s sidewalk intercession, two young Black men in jerseys, jeans, and sneakers have found their way into the sublimely decorative and heavenly realms of Titian and Tiepolo. These two works from Kehinde’s Passing/Posing series combine the traditions of Christian iconography and contemporary Black urban imagery with these singularly styled figures taking on poses reminiscent of angels and saints in Renaissance altarpieces and in later European portraits. The artist provokes ambiguity in using these disparate elements and encourages us to look at these paintings from a completely new point of view.

Installation view of Kehinde Wiley at the Brooklyn Musuem, New York, 2004. Image: Brooklyn Museum, New York, Artwork: ©Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde adopts the traditions of earlier European representation in his Passing/Posing series to boldly explore the imagery of power and status over centuries of Western art. The Passing/Posing portraits confront the historical exclusion of the Black body, and it is through this confrontation that Wiley achieves his goal in making Black men visible to us today through a visual vocabulary intimately linked to qualities of prestige and privilege. Taking this exploration even further, Wiley helps us to look at the issues surrounding Black male identity and, indeed, masculinity more broadly. These portraits of young Black men question how identity is built and its intersection with the performative impulses of Passing/Posing.

Merging the historical conventions of Western art with contemporary Black identity has been the focus of Kehinde’s career. With his first solo exhibition of the Passing/Posing series at the Brooklyn Museum in 2004, this remarkable and visionary body of work was the artist’s debut onto the international art scene. These two works from that career-making exhibition are representative of Kehinde’s extremely profound and engaging ability to create both subtle and fraught dialogues between the Western and white visual representations of position, power, and privilege and the inclusion or, perhaps imposition, of the Black male’s image and transmogrifying identity.
- Provenance
  Deitch Projects, New York
  Acquired from the above by the present owner
- Exhibited
  Art Basel at Miami Beach/Deitch Projects, Kehinde Wiley: Faux/Real, December 3-8, 2003
  New York, Brooklyn Museum, Passing/Posing: Kehinde Wiley Paintings, October 8, 2004–February 6, 2005
- Literature
  Kehinde Wiley, Kehinde Wiley: Passing/Posing, Paintings & Faux Chapel, New York, 2004, p. 14 (illustrated on unbound reproduction)
  Sarah Lewis, "De(i)fying the Masters," Art in America, April 2005, p. 121 (Deitch Projects, Miami, 2003 installation view illustrated)
  Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2015, fig. 9 (Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2004-2005 installation view illustrated, p. 23)