I had been thinking about dropping Kehinde Wiley on this list, and then half the people I was thinking about were Juxtapoz-featured "street" artists, so I kinda figured I should have Wiley on the list for some fine art balance. And then we trade in some books for store credit at Barnes & Noble today and I get a new Juxtapoz and it's fucking Kehinde Wiley on the cover. But Wiley is far beyond that normal upwardly mobile graffiti artist realm of artist. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond actually bought a Wiley painting (seen above) and had it displayed while they've been undergoing this constant renovation for the past few years, and I went to see it in person, because all I'd seen were these little magazine reprints of his stuff, small and funny looking since it's traditional portraiture style but with some modern black dudes in modern clothes in the pic instead of Napoleon or St. John or whoever. The thing is, Kehinde Wiley works on a huge scale, like the painting I saw was a good 6 foot by 6 foot. And the backgrounds, mocking or paying homage or just sampling old school portrait styles, are perfect, looking like they got done in Photoshop, without a blemish untouched by a stamp and clone atonement. Yet he paints the whole fucking thing. It is amazing, but I would assume if he's in fine art museums, he's probably far out of my price range, even if I end up rich like I plan on being. But if we do end up getting a Kehinde Wiley, I'm gonna need a bigger house. Or a pole barn.
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