In June this year, it was announced that portraiture artist Kehinde Wiley will unveil his first monumental public sculpture in Times Square, New York on the 27th of September. In conjunction with Times Square Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) and Sean Kelly, ‘Rumors of War’ marks Wiley’s return to equestrian portraiture to engage its traditionally complicated visual rhetoric of warfare and heroism on an epic scale.
With the constructive aid of UAP, Wiley’s ‘Rumors of War’ depicts a young, African- American subject dressed in urban streetwear sitting astride a regal steed in a striking pose, in what has been noted as a continuation of the artist’s career-long investigation of the politics of representation, race, gender, and power.
Regarding the new sculpture, Wiley stated that, “The inspiration for ‘Rumors of War’ is war— is an engagement with violence. Art and violence have for an eternity held a strong narrative grip with each other. ‘Rumors of War’ attempts to use the language of equestrian portraiture to both embrace and subsume the fetishization of state violence. New York and Times Square in particular sit at the crossroads of human movement on a global scale. To have the ‘Rumors of War’ sculpture presented in such a context lays bare the scope and scale of the project in its conceit to expose the beautiful and terrible potentiality of art to sculpt the language of domination.”
Kehinde Wiley is a world-renowned visual artist, best known for his vibrant portrayals of contemporary African-American and native individuals around the world, which subvert the hierarchies and conventions of European and American portraiture.
Wiley’s career has focused on addressing and remedying the absence of black and brown men and women in our dominant visual, historical, and cultural narratives. Wiley’s subjects have ranged from street-cast individuals the artist encountered while traveling around the world to many of the most important and well-renowned African American figures of our generation, including The Notorious B.I.G., LL Cool J, Carrie Mae Weems, Nick Cave, and President Barack Obama.