Kehinde Wiley at “An Archaeology of Silence” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco with his monumental 2022 painting, “Femme piquée par un serpent (Mamadou Gueye).” Works were made in response to the killings of Black men and women — “bodies chopped down,” the artist said. This one nods to an 1847 sculpture “Woman Bitten by a Serpent” by Auguste Clésinger.Credit...Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
By Dionne Searcey, The New York Times, March 16, 2023
When Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition, “An Archaeology of Silence,” opens in the United States on March 18, the most important room some viewers might enter is one with no artwork at all.
The “respite room” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco will be an area where visitors can take a breath and regain their composure after viewing the display of almost billboard-size paintings and huge sculptures of Black men and women in sometimes crumpled positions — struck down, resting, wounded or dead — in settings that reference iconic Western paintings of religious and mythological subjects.
Among the 25 pieces is “Reclining Nude in Wooded Setting (Edidiong Ikobah),” a painting of a woman in a white tank top, cutoff jean shorts and white sneakers who lies across grassy terrain, her braids bunched atop her head. One 17.5-foot-tall sculpture, titled the same as the exhibition, depicts a limp, shirtless man in jeans and high-tops, draped over a majestic horse. Another sculpture called “The Virgin Martyr Cecilia (Ndey Buri),” shows a lifeless, contorted woman in a miniskirt and sandals lying across the ground.
Comments (0)