Kehinde Wiley's art brings color to the Old Masters — in more ways than one

New York painter Kehinde Wiley became a star in the art world for his images of everyday people — people of color from Harlem, Haiti, France and beyond — done up in the style of grand European portraits once reserved for kings, queens and assorted nobles.

It’s a visual gesture that might call to mind the Broadway smash “Hamilton,” which casts actors of color who rap their way through early American history as the Founding Fathers. So, does that comparison make Wiley smile or frown?

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“It makes me smown,” Wiley said in a recent interview at the Phoenix Art Museum, which just opened a retrospective of his work titled “A New Republic.”

“There’s no just-add-water recipe to what I’m doing,” said Wiley, who grew up in Los Angeles and was educated at Yale.

“If anything, what I’m dealing with is in doubt. What I’m dealing with is in confusion. Sure, we’re dealing with art that came before and people who live now, and that’s a very pat way of boiling it down to opposing poles. But the minute you get closer to it, the more you think you know, the less you do. …

“The contours of the self, and doubt, and the free flow of all of that is what my work is about, and I think that the ‘Hamilton’ phenomenon is about certainty. I think that Americans, by and large, want to have an origin story, some sort of terra firma that we can know about ourselves — this much we know is true. Doubt is the antithesis of the early American creation myth. We don’t want all that doubt.”

“Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic” was organized by the Brooklyn Museum, which has shown much of the artist’s work over the years. The touring exhibition is in Phoenix through Jan. 8. Spanning 15 years of paintings, it also includes bronze sculptures, video works and a series of stained-glass window installations.

We’ll leave it “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda to defend his honor on the doubt-vs.-certainty front — hey, a good Twitter war is always good for publicity. But one thing there can be no doubt about is the visual impact of Wiley’s paintings, which are often huge and popping with color.

There’s “Portrait of Andries Stilte,” titled and posed after a 17th-century Dutch portrait of a dandified merchant, who has been replaced by a young black man in a baggy sports jacket and surrounded by swirling golden filigrees. And there are similarly attired figures pictured on horseback — although when Michael Jackson posed for an equestrian portrait, he insisted he be wearing armor.

A hail of orange-pink flowers makes a wry contrast with the violence re-created in “Judith Beheading Holofernes.” And there’s no mistaking the irony in the title of “The White Slave,” which replaces the half-nude woman in an 1888 French painting with a dark-skinned (and fully clothed) man that Wiley met during a trip through India and Sri Lanka.

While Wiley painted Spike Lee and Carmelo Anthony for a fund-raiser organized by Grey Goose vodka, the celebrity images are exceptions (“When Michael Jackson calls you, you pick up the f--king phone”). Instead, Wiley prefers what he calls “street casting” — essentially asking random strangers to pose for him. He often lets the subject choose the historical painting to be referenced.

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“For me the real power in Kehinde’s work and the discipline in his practice is that those people are absolutely not celebrities,” said Gilbert Vicario, the Phoenix museum’s chief curator. “They’re everyday people, and to me that’s what gives the whole body of work its power.”

Some viewers have interpreted the images as making a particular point about identity politics, but Wiley says that’s not the case.

“Are they all powerless, all they all poor and uneducated? I have no f--king idea,” he said. “Like, I meet a lot of people out there on the streets, and (they say), ‘I know exactly who you are, Mr. Wiley. I’ve been a lifelong member of the Brooklyn Museum, and I like your work, thank you very much.’ And they could be in a hoodie and sagging pants and what have you. So all these notions about what we expect of people are fascinating.”

But even if he doesn’t have a particular ax to grind, there’s no mistaking the political nature of Wiley’s project, which represents an invasion of an elite art-historical space by people who have been excluded from that world.

“Everyone loves a polemic — good, bad, black, white, up, down, yada,” the artist said. “But once you get up in there, you realize you can actually embrace the history of Western European easel painting and how to make s--t look sexy and beautiful and glamorous, but you can also be attempting to slash the throat of the empire that gave rise to that system — but not really wanting to because without the system you wouldn’t have the stuff, and, well, after a while you sort of realize that you’re mired in gray. And I think that that level of doubt is good.”

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.

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‘Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic’

When: Through Sunday, Jan. 8.

Where: Phoenix Art Museum, 1625 N. Central Ave.

Admission: $5 in addition to regular admission fee ($18, with discounts for seniors, students and children).

Details: 602-257-1222, phxart.org/KehindeWiley.