BROOKLYN, NY.- The Brooklyn Museum presents Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, the first museum survey of the artist’s rich and prolific career, on view from February 20 through May 24, 2015.

Comprised of approximately sixty objects, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic highlights the range of the artist’s work. The exhibition includes his early portrait paintings, inspired by the artist’s observation of street life in Harlem and set to the visual language of classical European portraiture, as well as his recent explorations in sculpture and stained glass.

Kehinde Wiley has received critical acclaim for his investigation of race, power, and the politics of representation, and his work has been lauded for giving new meaning to the social codes of gesture and dress, past and present, while challenging stereotypes about masculinity and class today, in America and around the world.

Works on view include selections from his ongoing World Stage series. Initiated in China in 2006, The World Stage examines socioeconomic conditions and culture through the everyday lives of people in India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Jamaica, and Nigeria, among other countries. Also on view will be his bronze busts, as well as his recent portraits of women from his series An Economy of Grace, and his new stained-glass “paintings.”

Kehinde Wiley works in the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection include a chapel-like space devoted to large paintings from his Passing/Posing series (2003) along with the portrait Miss Susanna Gale (2009) and the sculpture Houdon Paul-Louis (2011). The artist’s Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), installed in the Museum’s lobby, is on long-term loan. In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum presented Passing/Posing, Wiley’s first solo museum exhibition.

Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles, received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1999, and an MFA from Yale University in 2001. His works are in the collections of over forty museums, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Seattle Art Museum. Wiley has had solo exhibitions at the Phoenix Art Museum; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other museums. His work has been the subject of ten monographs to date. Wiley is currently working on multiple projects, including a monumental painting for a commission with “ART in Embassies” for the new United States Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition will travel to venues to be announced. A fully illustrated catalogue published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books/Prestel accompanies the exhibition.