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Derrick Ingram, a well-known Black Lives Matter activist, was hanging out in a private party room at the Soho Grand one night in 2021 when, as he remembers it, a man approached and offered to buy him a drink. Ingram, then 29, tall and muscular, recalls that the man wasn’t really his type — he was “older, short, heavyset,†with a big gap-toothed smile. Ingram declined the drink. “He just wasn’t doing anything for me.â€
Over the course of the night, Ingram noticed how people were lingering around the man and taking turns speaking to him. “Everybody’s attention was on him in the room,†he says. As the party wound down, the man cut through the crowd to again offer Ingram a drink. This time they had a conversation and Ingram realized that “he had a level of charisma that was just out of this world,†he says. “I was like, Oh, I want to get to know him.â€
He learned that the man was the artist Kehinde Wiley, then 44, who had risen to international fame in the mid-aughts for paintings that replace images of the heroic white men of art history — like Napoleon astride a stallion in Jacques-Louis David’s portrait — with young Black men in streetwear. Ingram wasn’t familiar with Wiley’s work until he discovered that he was also the artist behind that “beautiful†presidential portrait of Barack Obama seated against a wall of lush, green leaves.
Ingram’s and Wiley’s accounts of what happened next diverge dramatically. In Ingram’s version, they went home together that night and then stayed at Wiley’s Soho loft for nearly a week: “We hit it off, and he didn’t want me to leave.†Ingram remembers the apartment was “very artistic and extravagant†but also “absolutely trashed and chaotic.â€
Over the next couple of months, Ingram says, they dated casually — going on walks with Wiley’s Afghan hounds and out to dinner and parties, including one for Wiley’s friend, the artist Mickalene Thomas.
Wiley splits his time among New York, Dakar, and Lagos. He was generous, Ingram says, with both his money and his time. Sometimes he offered Ingram cash for no reason. “My impression,†Ingram says, was that “he had a thing for getting guys that he thought were of a lower class.†Ingram had recently left his career in marketing to focus on a nonprofit he had co-founded, Warriors in the Garden, which organized racial-justice protests. He says Wiley made promises about “introducing me to people, growing my nonprofit.â€
But, according to Ingram, Wiley could also be controlling. “He demeaned me,†he says. “He would choose my clothes. He would tell me at a party when I could talk, when I couldn’t talk.†He says Wiley often had drugs around and insisted they communicate via Signal, the encrypted messaging app, or by telephone, rather than text. Once, Ingram says, Wiley FaceTimed with a young man in Senegal in front of Ingram. The man “was naked and pretty much doing a nude cam show for Kehinde and asking Kehinde to wire him money.â€
Wiley denies any of that happened. He also denies the escalation Ingram says soon followed. Ingram claimed that Wiley once hit him in an Uber and that, in September 2021, he raped him. When I ask him to walk me through the encounter, Ingram tells me, “I would rather not do a play-by-play,†unless he files a lawsuit.
The end of the relationship came, Ingram says, after he stopped complying with Wiley’s demands, including refusing to sign an NDA. (Wiley also denies that he sought an NDA.) “He took it fine,†Ingram says of the split. “I think I was just a dime a dozen to him.â€
Two and a half years later, in March 2024, the 28-year-old Ghanaian artist and writer Joseph Awuah-Darko posted a video on his Instagram, which currently has 274,000 followers. Through tears, he silently flipped through a series of posters — like that part in Love Actually — on which he’d written, in capital letters, I KNOW MY LIFE WILL CHANGE 4EVER AFTER I SHARE THIS, BUT IT’S TIME TO COME TO THE LIGHT / A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED (SEVERELY)  / BY A SEMINAL FIGURE IN THE ART WORLD, SOMEONE I LONG ADMIRED WHOSE WORK IS RECOGNIZED IN MAJOR MUSEUMS ACROSS THE GLOBE. He said his fundraising target was $200,000 through PayPal or Cash App to aid “current and projected legal fees.†In a second post two months later, he alleged that his abuser was Kehinde Wiley.
Ingram says he immediately received “an influx of text messages and Instagram messages†from friends whom he said he’d told of his own experience with Wiley. Ingram adds that he reached out to Awuah-Darko, and three weeks later, in a joint Instagram post, they shared Ingram’s story: “On September 20th 2021, I was raped (unprotected) and sexually assaulted by Kehinde Wiley at his apartment in New York.†Ingram wrote that “there were moments of extreme violence. Along with severe emotional manipulation†throughout the relationship.
The next day, Wiley posted a response, saying that he and Awuah-Darko “had a one time encounter. Everything was consensual.†He also said that he believed Awuah-Darko had “managed to conspire†with Ingram to concoct his allegations, perhaps to extort money or perhaps because they both “wanted far more than I was willing to give them.â€
Around the same time, two other men came forward on Instagram: U.K. artist and poet Nathaniel Lloyd Richards, with an allegation of “aggressive and forceful†touching of his knee and thigh during a date with Wiley in Beijing in 2019, and Terrell Armistead, an independent historian from Yonkers who accused the artist of trying to “grab my genitals aggressively†and of “performing forced oral penetration on me†at the artist’s apartment in 2010. (Wiley denies the accusations, saying he has never met Lloyd Richards or Armistead; neither responded to requests for interviews, and both have since deleted their posts.)
So far, none of the accusers has brought suit against Wiley. Yet the allegations alone could dethrone one of the world’s most popular contemporary artists, whose work, more explicitly than any other, has inserted Black figures into the white art-historical canon. A large painting by Wiley frequently sells in the low-to-mid six figures (though sometimes for more), which is relatively modest for an artist of his stature, but not for one whose output is so prodigious as his has been. Wiley has studios in Beijing, Dakar, Brooklyn, and Lagos where assistants help create his work. His paintings have been acquired by hundreds of museums, as well as by celebrities and prominent art collectors including Elton John, Spike Lee, Venus Williams, Don and Mera Rubell, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, Alicia Keys, and Swizz Beatz. Now, some of those same museums, once eager to be associated with Wiley, are calling off his shows.
Meanwhile, his market appears to be stalling. Collectors who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Wiley’s paintings in the past are sitting on investments whose value might not be what it once was assumed to be. “You have to be really desperate†to sell a significant Wiley now, says art adviser Heather Flow, who adds that no one has asked her about him in the past six months or so. Not long before the allegations came out, the auction house Phillips in London set a record for Wiley’s work — $844,000 for an enormous, seven-by-15-foot painting of a reclining young man, eyes cast heavenward.
In June and October, Phillips withdrew two of Wiley’s works from auction at the last minute — a sign that no bids were coming in. “That upward trajectory has certainly been chopped off for now,†says art adviser Todd Levin of Wiley’s prices. A third work that came to Phillips in October, however, a painting, titled Sleep, of a man lying in a vulnerable position, sold for $327,000, which was above its estimate.
It’s unclear how long Wiley’s career might withstand gridlock. “I don’t know how the entire matter will eventually be resolved, but he can’t think it’s going to disappear on its own,†Levin says. “The issue will always be an asterisk next to his name until it’s dealt with.â€
Even Wiley acknowledges that people have decided they’re “going to need to see something other than just ‘he said, he said.’†Maybe that is why he, along with a watchful PR rep, agrees to meet me at his Williamsburg studio.
Wiley seems to be in an irritable mood. He had cut short a photo shoot, telling me that he didn’t like being looked at so up close.
After the allegations came out earlier in the summer, three museums had scrapped exhibitions of his work. The Pérez Art Museum in Miami and the Minneapolis Institute of Art both called off plans to host stops of his touring exhibition “An Archaeology of Silence,†while the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha indefinitely postponed its September show of paintings Wiley had made of members of the city’s Sudanese diaspora.
“Was I pissed? Hell yeah,†Wiley says.
One of the portraits slated for the Joslyn Art Museum now sat on its side in the studio. It shows a blue-haired young woman giving side-eye. “I really like this series of works because it allows me to go into deep, dark skin tones, where normally I use a lot of reds,†says Wiley. She stands against one of his trademark backgrounds: intensely chromatic flat patterns you’d expect to see on 18th-century French wallpaper or drapery, perhaps fleur-de-lis or filigree. In this case, it is a high-contrast floral design.
Wiley, wearing similarly busy patchwork jeans, continues his polite but half-hearted tour. He takes me to a table where he has laid out his latest project, miniature portraits of students he scouted at a university in Lagos. The pictures are headed to London for a show that has not been canceled, at Stephen Friedman Gallery. These paintings are about “quietude†instead of the “grand, chest-beating bravado†of much of his work. “My obsession,†he says, “is the big, billboard-size paintings that are, in a sense, showing off.â€
Wiley started developing this signature bombast while earning his M.F.A. at Yale. There, he befriended the program’s other two future stars, Wangechi Mutu and Mickalene Thomas, but has recalled that his work was frequently criticized by his peers as being too obvious and impersonal. At Yale, he was evidently steeped in the identity politics and postmodernism of the 1990s and wanted to both embrace and critique the Eurocentric art history he had been taught about. He admired how the older painter John Currin mashed up old-masters-style portraiture with an exuberant sexuality that borrowed from pornography. “He was capable of at once using the language of painting as a rhetorical strategy and inserting his own what you might call perversions into the picture,†Wiley said in 2003. “Currin is allowed to do that because it is Currin’s history. I never wanted to be white but that indisputable access to the history of Western painting becomes sickly desirable.â€
Wiley, coffee in hand, rubs his eyes as we take a seat on the couch. When I ask how he’s doing, he doesn’t hesitate. “It’s been a nightmare. It’s been an absolute nightmare,†he tells me. “I’m recovering from this traumatic exploding of my world that was so, so obviously calculated.â€
Wiley’s anger is particularly focused on Awuah-Darko, whom he calls “the ringleader to this entire circus.†The younger artist posts heavily produced and intensely confessional videos and photos on Instagram. Tears flow frequently, followed by words of empowerment; sometimes he poses in barely covered nudes with captions about vulnerability. He shares his struggles with bipolar disorder and impostor syndrome, with cancer and growing up gay in Ghana, where homosexuality is illegal. To Wiley, his allegations are part of an elaborate social-media performance.
“It starts with the teaser, with the emotional music and the signs and the glycerin tear — it was masterfully done, I have to say — and it presupposes a real, intuitive, and emotive understanding of the way that social media works,†he says. Awuah-Darko followed the “teaser†with “Episode Two: The Naming,†as Wiley puts it. “It’s just so vulgar and absurd.â€
“From the first moment that this happened, I’ve had to make some adjustments,†he says. “I’ve had to think about the shows that I had coming up and think about the ways in which they were seen. You know, do I want my public to be viewing my work through the rubric of this situation? Or do I want my work to be seen in its best light? And to that extent, I wanted to in many ways reconsider doing shows.â€
When I ask what kind of changes he had in mind, he seems to catch himself and says he didn’t actually make many. “There’s tons and tons of interest in my work. People know this is bullshit,†he says. “The demand for my work is robust.â€
Nonetheless, he raises a valid concern. Wiley’s art, both in its subject matter and in its process, has always intertwined sexuality and power dynamics. The nature of the allegations could make it harder for some viewers to separate this art, in particular, from the artist and what they think they know about his personal life.
Wiley has long been explicit about the erotic aspects of his work and the often fine line that separates admiration and exploitation. “I want to aestheticize masculine beauty and to be complicit within that language of oppressive power while at once critiquing it,†he said in 2003. He’d just finished a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a neighborhood “teeming with this sexy black young energy,†he later told The New Yorker.
He developed a process he calls “street casting,†in which he invited men (and sometimes women, but far less frequently) into his studio to photograph them — in hoodies, jerseys, and boxers scrunched up at the waist — and offered them a selection of haughty poses from art history, sometimes accessorized with swords or spears. The New Yorker called his street casting “a practice that parallels cruising†and added that “Wiley excels at the pickup line.†He has searched out people with style, and, according to a GQ writer who profiled Wiley as he was scouting teenage boys in Morocco in 2013, he preferred the shy, skeptical types — the ones he had to win over. On occasion, especially in countries where homosexuality is illegal, Wiley has worn a wedding ring to allay fears about his intentions; flashing the Obama portrait can also help seal the deal.
In a controversial Village Voice review from 2015, the critic Jessica Dawson wondered, “In what world is a Yale-minted artist who lures young men into his studio with the promise of power and glamour not predatory?†A wave of response pieces branded the review as racist, homophobic, and at the edge of libel, but numerous people I spoke with brought it back up amid the recent allegations. Dawson acknowledges today that she wasn’t aware of any actual wrongdoing on Wiley’s part when she wrote it. “It was simply my reaction to the work. I could never have anticipated, prophesied, or foreshadowed any recent allegations,†she says.
When I broach the subject with Wiley, he is quick to point out that the writer “got reprimanded, to say the least.†His contempt for the review, and for being asked about it, is palpable. “It was roundly criticized and presumed to be blatantly homophobic. Yeah — what about it?†he says. Then his tone softens and he says that viewers should trust the feeling they get in the presence of his paintings (which, technically, is what Dawson did, at least through her critical lens). “Is there a loving embrace in the work, or is there something sinister in the work?†he says. “You can trust your heart on that.â€
Wiley’s strategy for dealing with the allegations has been to publicly fight back. He hired Marathon Strategies, a crisis-PR and investigative firm that has been helping him highlight unflattering information about his accusers. Awuah-Darko suggested on Instagram that Wiley had also hired the U.K.-based firm Vantage Intelligence as part of an effort “to discredit me and other survivors.†A spokesperson for Wiley says his lawyers hired the firm “to assist in their investigation into the accusations†and not “as part of some attack campaign to dig up dirt.â€
Wiley argues that he has had no choice but to bring in professionals to help him. By speaking out primarily on social media, his accusers have controlled the narrative and largely evaded the scrutiny of lawyers and journalists. “Someone makes these false statements about you and you’re just expected to live with it?†Wiley says.
In June, he posted screenshots on Instagram to clear up the “baseless and defamatory†claims against him. He confirms that he and Awuah-Darko first met at an event held at the younger artist’s Noldor Residency in Ghana, a program for emerging African artists. “He looked like a completely responsible, sane individual with something to lose, with an arts organization,†Wiley says. The screenshots show that Awuah-Darko called Wiley twice at 4 a.m. that evening before going to Wiley’s hotel room.
According to Awuah-Darko, Wiley had already “inappropriately groped†him earlier in the night, and, although he went to his room later, he claims he didn’t consent to sex. A second assault that was “much more severe and violent†allegedly then took place. He wrote on Instagram, “It almost destroyed me.â€
Wiley characterizes it as a “flirtatious night, a little, you know, queer hookup situation.†He points out how, afterward, Awuah-Darko continued to send Wiley messages and posted dozens of Instagram Stories about him. A year after their encounter, Wiley invited him to his birthday party in Lagos, and Awuah-Darko, who then lived in London, attended; another time, he asked to visit Wiley at his Catskills cabin.
In July, Artnet News reported that Foster Sakyiamah, a former artist at Awuah-Darko’s residency, was demanding $266,527 from Awuah-Darko, claiming he’d sold Sakyiamah’s paintings and never paid him. Sakyiamah’s lawyer says he delivered the letter to Awuah-Darko in March, two weeks before Awuah-Darko posted his plea for $200,000 to aid a legal fight with his then-unnamed abuser. When Sakyiamah had still allegedly received no payments by June, he sued.
When asked about the similarity between the two sums, Awuah-Darko tells me in an email that perhaps Wiley was behind Sakyiamah’s suit. “I find the timing of this baseless lawsuit by a former resident peculiar and disappointing,†Awuah-Darko writes. “I am presently engaged in the process of filing a counterclaim in Ghana to clear this.â€
Sakyiamah’s lawyer, Joachim Benzaang, tells me in an email, “The suit was mounted independently by Foster upon legal advice he received from his solicitors without any external influence whatsoever.â€
When I ask what he did with the donations he raised, since no legal action has been taken, Awuah-Darko says, “My wonderful friend Rose McGowan sold her home a few years ago in order to finance pending and anticipated legal action against her rapist, Harvey Weinstein. This surprised me. And so with this knowledge, and considering my abuser’s power and profile, on March 23rd, my appeal for contributions was made towards anticipated legal fees for the battle ahead.â€
In August, Wiley gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal, whose affluent readership includes many art collectors. The story shared Wiley’s rebuttal to the allegations — the flirtatious texts both Awuah-Darko and Ingram sent Wiley after the alleged rapes, the coordinated social-media posts by the four accusers. Awuah-Darko told the paper that “I gaslit myself for so long because I admired Kehinde’s work and the pedestal I’d put him on.†He admitted that he was not the “perfect sexual assault victim†but reiterated, “I was raped.â€
The story also pointed out apparent inconsistencies, like Armistead’s recollection that Wiley had two big dogs at his apartment when he was there in 2010. Wiley produced receipts showing that he and his ex-boyfriend bought an Afghan hound from breeders in 2015, which Wiley says proves he didn’t own any big dogs before that. (He has been pictured with Italian greyhounds, a smaller breed, in those years).
When I ask Wiley how he feels about the Journal story, he says he was “relieved†after reading it. “I had dinner with some friends last night, and they were all pretty happy that it’s like, finally, a situation in which the other side of the story is coming out.â€
Yet the matter is clearly still consuming him emotionally. Wiley can’t speak for long about any subject without returning to his outrage over the accusations. Awuah-Darko “needs to answer for why my evidence makes sense in one direction and he has nothing to support his accusations other than ‘I’m not the perfect victim,’†Wiley says. “Well, therapyspeak is not enough to destroy someone’s life.â€
He walks me through it. “Look at their social media,†he says, now referring to Ingram and Armistead. “They’re both doing ads for grocery money, rent money. When you think about motive or where they are in their lives — we’re literally talking about rent and grocery money here — and then all of a sudden, you’re seeing online [Awuah-Darko] saying, ‘Hey, have you met Kehinde Wiley? We have money. We have lawyers. Wink, wink.’ What do you expect when you have such a vulnerable, high-profile person in the world?â€
Indeed, Armistead’s posts on X last year discuss losing his unemployment benefits, and he has periodically asked followers for help buying food in the months since.
As for Ingram, the ad in question is a GoFundMe page created more than four years ago, at the height of the pandemic. In it, Ingram writes that his apartment had been burglarized and he’d lost his job at a property-development firm for speaking out about gentrification. He had been a recognizable fixture at protests against police brutality — in a tank top on the front lines, megaphone in hand — since 2014. That was the year he graduated with an M.B.A. from St. Louis University and the year that Michael Brown, a guy he’d seen around the neighborhood, was shot and killed by a police officer. Ingram joined the protests in Ferguson and then, after George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020, decided to dedicate himself fully to his activism. During that transition, he wrote on the GoFundMe, “I will need help with rent, groceries and bills. Black lives matter is my life.†(Ingram has since hosted online fundraisers for the Lupus Foundation and for medical aid to Gaza.)
Wiley’s suggestion that someone’s socioeconomic status could be taken as evidence for or against a sexual-assault allegation is surprising to hear, particularly from an artist who has made a career in part out of elevating people from traditionally marginalized groups into aristocratic poses.
According to Wiley, he doesn’t really know Ingram at all. He says that every single thing Ingram told me was a lie, except for the fact that they met at the Soho Grand and hooked up after (though they disagree about whether that happened in July or September).
“It was a one-night stand,†Wiley says. “That’s it. There’s no Signal, there’s no Mickalene party. There’s no crystal meth, there’s no coke. Sorry, all of that is complete fiction.†(Mickalene Thomas did not respond to a request for comment.)
Wiley pulls out his phone to show me the text history between him and Ingram. His phone showed it starting on September 8 with Wiley sending Ingram screenshots from an article that the New York Times had published about the activist, whose home the NYPD had “besieged†in what the DA’s office later denounced as “extraordinary tactics.â€
If Ingram had ever responded to Wiley’s screenshots, it wasn’t via text message. A few days later, Ingram wrote Wiley at 8:24 p.m., saying, “Hey I’m ready handsome.†If Wiley had ever responded, it also wasn’t via text message. That exchange seemed to contradict Wiley’s claims that they had met only once.
When I later press his reps about why Ingram might have said “I’m ready†days after the “one-night stand,†they eventually concede that the pair did meet at least one other time. The exchange also seems to contradict Wiley’s claim that the whole relationship could be seen in these dozen texts.
Still, these inconsistencies don’t prove Wiley’s guilt any more than Ingram’s use of heart emojis proves he’s lying, as Wiley suggests: “Do we use love emojis to someone who has violently raped you?†he asks at one point. “It takes a lot of bending over backward and folding yourself into a pretzel to understand these arguments.â€
Research in recent years has shown it’s relatively common for victims of sexual violence to not immediately recognize it as such and to blame themselves. Confusion can be even more pronounced among male victims, who “are conditioned by society to believe that all sex is good sex, and if you’re a man, to have any sexual opportunity is welcome,†says Lara Stemple, a UCLA Law assistant dean who specializes in sexuality and gender. The picture becomes even more complicated among gay men. One study found that “homophobic attitudes toward gay male victims increased the blame attributed to them,†while “perpetrators of rape of gay men were seen as least responsible for their actions.â€
Ingram says it took him years to process what had happened to him. In his mind, Wiley was a brilliant eccentric whose lifestyle seemed somehow exempt from social norms. Perhaps his behavior was even considered typical among people of his stature. “I was meeting so many new people and other celebrities and getting access to spaces I’d never been before, and I thought, truly, Damn, maybe this is actually what comes with this type of lifestyle, and he’s providing and showing me things that I’d never experienced before, so I was blaming myself.â€
Ingram told me that he, too, could prove — through messages, voice memos, and photos — that Wiley was lying about their relationship. But our conversations ended after I asked him multiple times if he could provide any of it or refer me to people who might corroborate his account. When I later presented him with Wiley’s version of events for response, Ingram said that my questions had “retraumatized†him and did not send any documentation.
Nobody’s story — not Ingram’s, not Awuah-Darko’s, not Wiley’s — looks completely convincing from the outside. But even unresolved, the accusations have thrown open a rereading — the kind Wiley didn’t want — of his life and work and the art world’s own tradition of propping up the powerful. What started out 20 years ago as a compelling way to expose the racism of art history and exalt those ignored by it now seems less like a critique than a celebratory reenactment of a ruling social order of which Wiley has become a part.
Now, Wiley, who is self-made, has everything to lose. He grew up in a well-educated working-class family in South Central Los Angeles. Even as a teenager, Wiley was a gifted promoter. While attending the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, he began staging art shows for friends and family at home, serving sparkling cider. “I understood very early about the social component to art,†he told The New Yorker. The proceeds helped him afford the expenses of attending the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a B.F.A. in 1999.
Wiley found an ideal early partner in Jeffrey Deitch, a dealer known for spotting buzzy talent and throwing big parties. It was immediately clear that Wiley was Deitch’s kind of artist. “It was never about just hanging up six paintings or ten paintings,†he says of Wiley’s shows. “It was creating a world.†For their first show together, “Faux Real†in 2003, “he wanted to paint a ceiling like Tintoretto†— and he did. The following year, when the artist was just 27, the Brooklyn Museum gave him his first institutional solo show.
The museum would later acquire and display the nine-by-nine-foot Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps, depicting a black horseman in camouflage and Timberlands against a background with tiny sperm swimming throughout — a recurring theme in his early work.
In a review of Wiley’s equestrian portraits at Deitch Projects in 2005, New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that he was “a history painter, one of the best we have. By this I mean that he creates history as much as tells it.†From there, his career skyrocketed. VH1 commissioned him to paint portraits of rappers including LL Cool J, which later went on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Wiley’s style doesn’t impress everyone — Roberta Smith of the New York Times called his surfaces “dead and mechanical,†and the critic Ben Davis has likened Wiley to “an art director selling a formula.†But Wiley ascribes his work’s popularity to “how hungry people are to see what they know to be beautiful acknowledged as such.â€
“The whole idea†of the street casting, says Wiley’s friend and occasional collaborator Dwayne Rodgers, is that he meets strangers who are, say, “walking from A to B on a dreary street in Queens†and then, “through a series of magical wand waves, they end up on the walls of major museums.†Wiley relishes that power; instead of Andy Warhol’s (apocryphal) 15 minutes of fame, he offers a kind of immortality. “Fuck the 15 minutes,†Wiley once said. “I’m going to give you a painting, and I’ll make you live forever.â€
Clevins Browne was an unemployed 24-year-old when he answered a Craigslist ad a decade ago seeking Black male models around five-foot-ten. Browne, now a stand-up comic and spoken-word artist in Philadelphia, tells me he left the job with $125 or so in earnings, happy that he wasn’t asked to do any nudes. Years later, he heard from friends that they’d seen a painting of him by Wiley. “I haven’t seen it in any galleries myself,†he says. “But it’s just amazing to know that it’s possible that that painting probably has impacted someone somewhere.â€
In recent years, Wiley has experimented with even more grandiose scale and materials: equestrian statues in the style of Confederate war memorials, lifeless bronze figures reminiscent of imagery from police shootings, stained-glass windows of Black people in high-tops and puffy jackets assuming the postures of saints.
In 2019, he cast himself in the role of Paul Gauguin by visiting Tahiti to make portraits. Wiley acknowledges the “creepy†gaze that led Gauguin to Tahiti at 43 to paint nude Indigenous girls and to marry one who was probably 13. But Wiley nonetheless decided to take the great artist as the “contact lens†through which to view his own pictures of Polynesians. “The ways we see Black and brown bodies from the Pacific are shot through his sense of desire. But how do you change the narrative? How do you change the way of looking?†Wiley wondered. He decided to paint the island’s “third gender†mahu people and have them pick their own poses.
But it’s not always clear that Wiley is shifting the dominant gaze as much as he may think. And not everybody he paints is a nobody. In addition to President Obama and Naomi Campbell, last year he painted 11 African heads of state for a show titled “A Maze of Power.†He didn’t want to give what he called “a morality test†to the subjects, who include former Guinea president Alpha Condé, who was accused of torture and deposed in a coup. “I’m trying to look at the African presidency in images because there is no tradition of it,†he said at the time.
In 2019, he opened Black Rock Senegal, a resortlike residency that provides emerging artists with studios, a spa, a pool, a gym, a library, an on-site chef, and apartments overlooking the ocean. It opened with an enormous party at which Alicia Keys, Swizz Beatz, and artists like Henry Taylor were on hand. In late May, just after Awuah-Darko made his allegations public, Wiley reportedly told staff that “the coffers are empty†and that Black Rock was shutting down. The magazine Jeune Afrique later reported that the residency wouldn’t close after all but would operate under “a new model†that Black Rock was “currently defining.â€
Wiley was supposed to be in control of this kingdom. He now laments the arrival of Warhol’s future, where everyone can be famous for 15 minutes. “Every individual has that power in their palm with devices. It starts to create this echo chamber in which we need the adults in the room more than ever,†he says. “Warhol was right. I don’t know how he did it, but he predicted it. And so our jobs now are to create traditions, institutions, practices, in which we say, ‘All right, hold on, let’s fact-check.’â€
When Awuah-Darko posted his allegations, he also started a Change.org petition, currently signed by 1,361 names, asking for Wiley’s galleries to “conduct thorough and independent investigations into these claims to ensure justice and support for all victims.â€
Sean Kelly, Wiley’s gallery in New York, has never responded to the allegations. But two of Wiley’s other galleries have pushed back against that idea. It is “crucial that any claims are addressed through proper legal channels,†reads a statement from Templon. “As a private art gallery, we respect the presumption of innocence and believe it is not our role to comment on these posts publicly.â€
A representative for Stephen Friedman Gallery says, “It is important not to discount or discredit the voices of victims of abuse. Equally, we should rush neither to the judgment of alleged perpetrators, nor to their defense. There is an appropriate forum for each to be heard.â€
What that forum might be is unclear. A lawsuit seems unlikely. Awuah-Darko and Lloyd Richards live in Europe, and the statute of limitations has run out in Armistead’s case. Ingram may be the only one able to file a claim against Wiley, which he told me he’s considering: “I’m dealing with a lot of pressure and anxiety about feeling like this is all riding on me.â€
And Wiley, for his part, doesn’t seem all that inclined to bring defamation charges (although his spokespeople emphasize that he hasn’t ruled it out). Instead, he seems to be hoping it will blow over or that the media will help resolve what he sees as the “lapse of some core and almost elementary principles surrounding storytelling.â€
Friedman Gallery’s decision to show Wiley’s work at this moment has been met with some surprise.​​ “It’s so crazy to me,†says Heather Flow. “I guess they’re just pretending like it doesn’t matter.†Flow had noticed that Templon hung a 2012 Wiley painting front and center at its booth at Art Basel Paris in late October. “Who in their right mind would try and resell that painting right now?†she says she wondered — except perhaps Wiley himself, who at some point may be in need of funds, given the expense of his global operation. Some art-world observers tell me that Wiley misstepped in publicly lashing out at his accusers, but they also tend to think he will recover. “He probably needs to keep his head down and do his work,†says the art adviser Victoria Burns. “In this recalibration-of-the-market moment, the cream is rising to the top again, and Kehinde Wiley will definitely remain cream.â€
Museum directors, however, have been much quicker to cancel Wiley. This rapid response to controversy is the status quo for museums shaken up by the social-justice movements of recent years, Levin says. Protesters pushed out key staffers like San Francisco Museum of Art chief curator Gary Garrels, who said a ban on collecting white guys would be “reverse discrimination,†and trustees like Whitney Museum board member Warren Kanders, who resigned after Whitney Biennial artists pulled out to protest his company’s manufacturing of tear gas. As a result, “if there’s an iota — just a shred of an iota — of any impropriety, it’s wiser to simply shut that idea or exhibition down,†says Levin.
There was some pushback against the museum cancellations. The National Coalition Against Censorship, a group formed by ACLU activists in 1973, issued a statement condemning museums for improperly acting as “enforcers of moral orthodoxy.†A few months earlier, the group had urged Indiana University to reinstate its museum’s retrospective on the Palestinian American abstract painter Samia Halaby, which it shuttered for unspecified “security concerns.â€
“This kind of response,†says Elizabeth Larison, the coalition’s arts-and-culture advocacy-program director, “feeds this reactionary culture of fear and erasure that impoverishes the cultural sphere.â€
A suit of armor stands against a wall at the entrance to Wiley’s studio. He may have worn this suit, or perhaps it was another one, he can’t remember, for the cover of a special portraiture edition of Vanity Fair in 2019.
On the one hand, armor, as Wiley sees it, is a metaphor for portrait painting itself. “I think the narrative always with portraiture has to do with armor,†he once told Hyperallergic. “Clothing as armor. Something [at] once that keeps something out and holds something in.†On the other hand, it represents a form of protection one might need after achieving a certain rank in life.
“Let’s face it: I have the ability to rally heads of state and to exhibit my work in some of the biggest museums across the world, and still do I have among my friends some very celebrated people — I’m not nuts; like, I recognize my position,†he says. “But I just didn’t recognize my vulnerability in the sense that I didn’t know how easy it was to come into someone’s life and cynically manipulate social media.â€
An early example of Wiley incorporating armor in his work was his 2009 portrait of Michael Jackson. Jackson had seen one of Wiley’s equestrian paintings and had asked if he could commission a similar portrait of himself. “I was like, ‘Well, normally no because I usually paint just randos,’†he tells me. But he thought, Let’s try this — it’s Michael Jackson. The resulting painting, inspired in part by Peter Paul Rubens’s portrait of King Philip, shows the King of Pop on horseback, in glinting gold armor, with cherubs fluttering overhead.
Wiley has said that Jackson viewed armor as a kind of artifice and as a part of the “castle†he had built: “He was interested in the armor as a metaphor, and I thought it was great, and it was this kind of weird negotiating of his career.†Today, Wiley says he’s become “obsessed with armor†and plans to use it more in his upcoming work.
Just across from the armor is a painting of a glowing young man with close-cropped hair and high cheekbones standing in a tangle of flowering vines. It’s Wiley’s partner, the 27-year-old Nigerian model Kenneth Okorie.
Okorie’s Instagram shows what his life has been like since he and the artist met on a dating app a few years ago: private jets, an invitation to a Louis Vuitton fashion show, partying with Wiley and Naomi Campbell in Cannes.
Wiley says the crisis has brought the couple closer together. “We’re on the phone every day. We travel incessantly together, just trying to create little moments of quiet away from all of this and being there for each other.†But the timing of the allegations couldn’t be more “monstrous.†Wiley says he was “literally on the phone with my fertility doctor — †His voice starts to quaver. He was in the process of having a baby around the time the news broke. “I’ve had my life going prior to this nuclear bomb dropping on it.â€
Tears are now streaming down his face as he seems to plead with me: “I’m not the kind of person who rapes people. I’m the kind of person who wants to give a child love.â€
The publicist interrupts to make sure Wiley is okay. He wipes the tears away, excuses himself, and heads to another room. When Wiley returns a few minutes later with a tissue, his indignation has come back, too. “I’m the victim. I’m the victim,†he says, his voice still shaky. “When you say ‘Believe victims,’ you should — you’re staring at one.â€