- In the Spirit of NégritudeKehinde Wiley in Africa
In 1997 Kehinde Wiley made his first trip to Africa to meet his father, a Nigerian man he had never known. This journey profoundly impacted the artist, who returned several times and established a studio practice there. Wiley documented each visit through portraiture, painting young men in poses and settings inspired by local history and traditions. Although a number of African sources directly inform his work, from the color and pattern of textiles to the format of sculptures, Wiley's response to Africa extends beyond formal considerations. In the spirit of Négritude he mined a collective African identity to contest former colonial hegemonies, critiquing the representation of race, status, and power in the process. Akin to the Pan-African advocates of the twentieth century, the artist employed a realist style to locate a shared heritage among the African diaspora. Reclaiming the African subject in portraits that reference traditional, colonial, and contemporary histories, Wiley continues the legacy of Négritude both aesthetically and conceptually. This approach distinguishes his work in Africa from previous projects based on urban locales and Western art historical contexts, linking Wiley to postcolonial discourses surrounding race and representation, while demonstrating Africa's continued influence on American art. [End Page 126]
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Négritude refers to a Francophone literary movement from the 1930s through the 1950s that redefined blackness within a collective African identity and cultural tradition.1 Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, the advocates of Négritude were university-educated writers who met in Paris during their studies. These individuals—Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léon Damas from Guiana, and Léopold Senghor of Senegal—published The Black Student in 1935, an anthology of writings that located unity throughout the African world. For these authors, colonialism engendered commonality across the diaspora, with experiences of alienation and subjugation coloring the perspectives of Africans everywhere. As a counter, Négritude espoused a self-conscious realization of this condition and sought to identify community among people of African descent. This ideal became promoted through culture, with Césaire, Senghor, and others celebrating African history and traditions in their poetry. Senghor, in particular, argued that a unique sensuality and rhythm characterized the black spirit. A vitalist mysticism and intuitive approach to knowledge further distinguished the African from the European, while the highly skilled craftsmanship of black artists validated cultural forms previously misunderstood by white, European standards. Although some criticized Négritude for essentializing Africa and promoting assimilation rather than militancy, it greatly influenced African independence efforts in the 1950s and 1960s.2 In fact, Léopold Senghor became the first president of the newly sovereign Senegalese nation in 1960, while Négritude provided some of the intellectual roots for black nationalism and the American civil rights movement.
In the case of Kehinde Wiley, Négritude provides a framework for contextualizing his "discovery" of Africa and subsequent efforts to identify with the continent. His relationship to the movement is not literal. Négritude predates his birth in Los Angeles, California, in 1977; however, a conceptual kinship links the artist to the ideals of Senghor and others. Wiley initially caught the attention of the art world with his academically staged portraits of inner-city males. He painted these men in baggy jeans, hoodies, and athletic shoes representative of hip-hop culture, yet the portraits were modeled after art historical precedents, with Wiley and his subjects selecting their poses from textbook reproductions of Old Master works. He depicted these figures on a large scale, placing his sitters before decoratively patterned backdrops and occasionally framing them within elaborately gilded woodwork. By rewriting the history of art to include the black subject, Wiley overturned what he called "the history of Western European white men in positions of dominance."3
This critical approach to...