Kehinde Wiley’s Catholic Imaginary

African-American contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s A New Republic offers a way to think about art and history as reflections on public culture

R. Benedito Ferrão | OCTOBER 02, 2016, 12:00 AM IST

Photo Credits: main piece

bio: R. Benedito Ferrão is a writer and academic. Connect with him at thenightchild.blogspot.com, or on Facebook at The Nightchild Nexus

***

My longest held memory of the brown-cassocked St. Anthony is of that time on a school holiday when my grandmother made me kneel in front of the altar because I had stayed out longer than usual. “Tell St. Anthony you’re sorry”, she ordered. Like so many Catholic Goans, my grandmother held the tonsured Franciscan in high esteem for the faith she placed in him as the finder of lost things, naughty lads included. A couple of weeks ago in the American city of Richmond, I encountered St. Anthony again at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art exhibition, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, and he looked different from my childhood memory.

In Wiley’s canvas, “Anthony of Padua” (2013), he is a young Black man. One of the decorative patches on his military green jacket bears the image of a snarling black panther, a symbol suggestive of the Black Power movement of 1960s’ America. Cradled in the crook of his left arm is a book instead of the Child Jesus. His raised right arm holds a rod in place of the traditional stalk of lilies. In this pose, it is as if the saint is a painter who looks upon his viewers haughtily. His gaze breaks the fourth wall between the dramatic portrait and its spectators, between the exalted and the mundane.

Reminiscent of the methods of Goan painter Angelo da Fonseca (1902-1967), the American Wiley employs ordinary people as subjects in depicting themes that evoke the Renaissance and other Western periods of art, as well as European Christian iconography. Where da Fonseca used South Asian models, including his wife Ivy, to render Christian imagery, Wiley’s muses of choice are everyday Black Americans. In both cases, these artists’ works subvert Eurocentric conceptions of the sacred, by challenging implicit assumptions of race and class in the idealisation of the divine. Moreover, their images alter public culture by demonstrating that the faithful come from various backgrounds. If such art is to be taken as political statement, then Wiley’s reverential presentation of Blackness resonates powerfully with the American Black Lives Matter movement which has grown in response to the police killings of Black people.

Wiley’s St. Anthony is inspired by the representation of the saint in the 1842-1843 stained glass window created by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres for Paris’ Chapelle St. Ferdinand. Christian imagery appears elsewhere in Wiley’s oeuvre, including in his own stained glass windows, which again characterise contemporary Black men as saints. At the Virginia exhibition, museum patrons would have walked through a dark chapel-like gallery to view these windows. They would then emerge into a brightly lit space to see pieces from Wiley’s Indian and Sri Lankan series.

In Kehinde Wiley – The World Stage: India-Sri Lanka (2011), critic Gayatri Sinha notes that the artist’s South Asian subjects could be “an unemployed youth familiar from the streets of Bombay or Bangalore. Or … Goa’s beach boys, car cleaners from the streets of Tamil Nadu, or young advisasis (tribals) serving in the capital’s diplomatic enclave” (pp. 7-8). To say that Sinha lets slip her class and caste biases would be to state the obvious. Indeed, what Sinha fails to acknowledge is the divide that Wiley seeks to breach in placing his paintings of marginalised subjects in the elitist spaces of the art gallery and the museum. In saying that these subjects are recognisable, Sinha implies their objectification by the Indian art patron. This othering is intensified when the critic does not question why Wiley’s subjects must exist outside these exclusive circles.

“The European Orientalist discourse is invoked and vivified, but it also becomes the site for fresh enactments” in Wiley’s South Asia paintings, Sinha muses. Yet, it is Sinha herself who relies on an orientalised understanding of what constitutes South Asian culture when she traces a line between Wiley’s scenes of “temples or prayer rooms” and “Hindu painting tradition from the 17th to the 19th centuries” (p. 8). This British-inflected postcolonial Brahmanical rendition of India not only eschews the Portuguese Indian legacy (except to tellingly minimise it to “Goa’s beach boys”), but also refuses to consider other faith traditions as influences in South Asian art history.

Even as Sinha sees Wiley’s representations of Blackness as being linked to “histories of shared oppression” in the Afro-Asiatic context (p. 6), she is unable to connect the Catholic themes in the Nigerian American artist’s canon to South Asia. Wiley’s “Anthony of Padua” proves useful here. Though St. Anthony died in Padua, Italy in 1231, he was born in Portugal in 1195. Revered around the Catholic world, his legacy took particular shape in Portuguese Angola, where the 17th-18th century anti-colonial revolutionary Kimpa Vita claimed to be a medium for his spirit.

In the novel Skin (2001), based on the Portuguese Afro-Asiatic slave trade, Margaret Mascarenhas transports the enslaved progeny of Kimpa Vita to Goa. The novel’s magical realism manifests, among other things, in the form of the prophetess’ Goan descendants being able to shape-shift into black panthers. That the black panther appears as an emblem on St. Anthony’s jacket in Wiley’s painting is coincidental. However, what is not is how Wiley’s Catholic imaginary transcends space and time, in much the same way as a Portuguese saint shape-shifts into a Black person. Here, one figure is not meant to replace the other; rather, what is to be contended with is why one is not as revered as the other. It is through this palette of complexities that Kehinde Wiley envisions a new republic, even as he questions its borders.

***

Share this