Art: This Is Not Your Ancestor’s Portrait Gallery

There’s a young man in a painting. His head is shorn. His eyes don’t blink. His jaw is so sharp it could shave marble. And behind him? A riot of green leaves—ivy or acanthus or kudzu or maybe wallpaper stolen from an 18th-century Versailles powder room and then weaponized for maximum contrast.

His name is Jarrett. At least, for now. Because in Kehinde Wiley’s world, names are temporary but power is permanent.

Let’s get something straight. Jarrett (Study) isn’t a sketch. It’s a warning shot. It’s a side-eye to five centuries of European art history, politely suggesting that Caravaggio might need to move over and let someone else sit at the visual table. This is Wiley mid-incantation: summoning gods not from Olympus or Florence but from Harlem, Dakar, and South Central L.A.—cloaked not in togas, but in camo jackets, hoodies, and the lingering residue of hip hop, colonialism, and street hustle.

Kehinde Wiley doesn’t paint people. He anoints them.

And in Jarrett (Study), he’s baptizing his subject in oil paint and defiance.

Wiley’s whole project is to take the language of empire—those swooning oils, those silk-lined doublets, those smug aristocrats riding horses too big for their legacy—and remix it like a DJ who’s finally tired of playing Mozart for a crowd that’s never heard Dilla. His sitters don’t apologize. They don’t plead. They don’t thank you for your gaze. They meet it. They dare it.

In this portrait, Jarrett is not performing for the viewer. He isn’t smiling. He isn’t demure. He isn’t posing for a job interview at the Gates Foundation. He is the job. He is the foundation. He is the embodiment of a visual reparations package centuries overdue.

And that background? Don’t get it twisted. It’s not just pretty. Those leaf patterns are Wiley’s visual landmines—ornate, seductive, and absolutely subversive. They’re the art equivalent of a Beyoncé beat hiding a protest anthem. Sure, they look decorative, but they serve the same function as gold leaf in a medieval altarpiece: they frame a saint. A prophet. A Black body too often cropped out of the canon.

Wiley once said, “I am painting Black men in poses once reserved for kings.”

That’s not metaphor. That’s strategy.

And so, Jarrett (Study) isn’t just a portrait. It’s a power move in slow motion. A corrective to centuries of portraiture that treated Black bodies as props, afterthoughts, or—when the art world was feeling extra racist—absences.

So here’s the real question:

If your museum walls were your history textbooks, would you even exist in the story?

Wiley makes sure the answer is yes. And he does it with maximalist wallpaper, baroque rebellion, and subjects who look like they’ve already seen the future—and it’s wearing Air Jordans.

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