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His impeccably refined technique and ironic yet intellectual interpretation skewed high-art traditions while giving them new significance. He says, "I know how young black men are seen. Oil on canvas - National Maritime Museum, London, Kehinde Wiley was born and grew up in South-central Los Angeles with an African-American mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, and a Yoruba father from Nigeria, Isaiah D. Obot, who came to the United States as a scholarship student and then returned to Africa after finishing his studies to work as an architect, leaving Wiley's mother to raise their six children. The work was conceived as a response to now-controversial Confederate statues, such as that of Confederate General J.E.B. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. The year that Wiley graduated from his MFA he came across a crumpled piece of paper in the streets of Harlem, which he picked up and found to be a mug shot. The zodiac is also a fairly common motif, having been first mentioned in the medieval kabbalistic Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation) and in the late fifteenth-century Midrashic anthology Yalqut Shimoni. It depicts Obama sitting in a wooden chair, which appears to float among bright green foliage, interspersed with chrysanthemums, jasmine, and African blue lilies. You're 11, and you don't want to be seen jumping out to go through your neighbour's garbage. With her right hand she dispenses a gold coin to the poor (she was known for her charity). After exchanging glances with a potential candidate, Wiley approaches them and explains his art-making process, showing them some examples of his work. As throughout the series, Wiley has inscribed the name of the sitter, rather than the canonized saint of the paintings title, on the gilt frame. Kehinde Wiley's "St. Dionysius," a detail of which is pictured here, hangs at Milwaukee Art Museum. Wileys assistants applied the elaborately patterned backgrounds, but Wiley always painted the figure, following the conventional hierarchy of a historic atelier. The inclusion of sperm in the background is Wiley's way of referencing masculinity, highlighting black masculinity, and also poking fun at the excessive, over the top heroic heterosexual masculinity evoked by historical equestrian portraiture. The Down series predates the Black Lives Matter movement but speaks powerfully into that context. This painting is part of Wiley's Trickster series wherein he painted portraits of eleven prominent black contemporary artists (including Nick Cave, Rashid Johnson and Sanford Biggers, Yinka Shonibare, and Kerry James Marshall). Instead of the naturalistic setting of Davids painting, Wiley has inserted a decorative, unrealistic backdrop reminiscent of luxurious French fabric.