KEHINDE WILEY
RUMORS OF WAR

Like much of Wiley’s work, Rumors Of War is a quotation of centuries-old styles. It draws principally on militaristic statues that appeared in Italian city-states in the early Renaissance. But its immediate model was a statue commemorating the Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart, which was among the first to go up in Richmond during the rise of Jim Crow, at the turn of the twentieth century, when Southern cities started building such tributes.

With its immense scale and magical proportions, “Rumors of War” feels like a defiant response to white reactionary politics, but it also encapsulates a precarity that many Americans feel. The rider, who is just a guy in ripped jeans, has been thrust into conflict. The sculpture is more tender than resolute. Throbbing veins on a raging steed are warlike, but the rider’s exposed knee, framed by the frayed denim threads of his pant leg, seems vulnerable, even in bronze.

Wiley is working in step with other contemporary artists who are puncturing the fables of the Civil War.

Capps, K. (2019, December 24). Kehinde Wiley’s Anti-Confederate Memorial [Editorial], The New Yorker.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's portrait painting tradition. A 21st-century, African American painter and sculptor, whose works speak to race and racial consciousness, forcefully using the styles of earlier masters to express his contemporary sensibility.

By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, wealth, prestige, and history to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, Wiley makes his subjects and their stylistic references juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery.

Today, Wiley’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Denver Art Museum, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.