Phillips is honored to support the Seattle Art Museum’s highly anticipated exhibition Kehinde Wiley: New Republic. This sponsorship forms one part of our global program of arts partnerships in 2016, affirming our commitment to supporting and engaging with the world’s preeminent museums and public galleries.

Kehinde Wiley is one of the leading American artists to emerge in the last decade and he has been ingeniously reworking the grand portraiture traditions of Western culture. The artist began his first series of portraits in the early 2000s during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He set out to photograph and recast assertive and self-empowered young men from the neighborhood in the style and manner of traditional history painting. Trained at Yale in the 1990s, Wiley was steeped in the discussions concerning identity politics during this decade and he brings his personal insights and theoretical studies to his practice.

Wiley’s portraits are highly stylized and staged, and draw attention to the dialectic between a history of aristocratic representation and the portrait as a statement of power and the individual’s sense of empowerment.

Visit Seattle Art Museum to learn more. #KehindeWiley

This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum.