Kehinde Wiley & Swizz Beatz

Kehinde wiley

Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s tradition of portraiture.

As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds,

Gainsborough, Titian, and Ingres, among others, Wiley engages the signs and visual

rhetoric of the heroic, the powerful, the majestic and the sublime in his representation

of urban, black and brown people he meets throughout the world.

Wiley’s larger-than-life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portraiture, often blurring the

boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation.

Rather than shying away from the complicated socio-political histories relevant to the world,

Wiley critically addresses portrayals of gender and physicality as they pertain to views of

black and brown bodies according to both historic and contemporary paradigms.

Working in the mediums of painting, sculpture, and video, Wiley creates portraits that

challenge and reorient art-historical narratives, awakening complex issues that many

would prefer to remain mute.

Wiley holds a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute; an MFA from Yale University;

and honorary PhDs from Rhode Island School of Design and San Francisco Art Institute.

Wiley has held solo exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally.

His works are included in the collections of numerous public institutions

around the world.

Wiley was honored in 2015 by the U.S. Department of State with the Medal of Arts award,

celebrating his commitment to cultural diplomacy through the visual arts.

In February 2018, his portrait of Barack Obama was added to the permanent installation of

presidential portraits in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

He received the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal in October 2018 from Harvard University’s

Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and The Gordon Parks

Foundation Award in 2019. Wiley is the Founder and President of Black Rock Senegal,

a non-profit artist-in-residence program located in Dakar, Senegal.

Wiley lives and works in New York, Dakar, and Beijing.

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Swizz beatz

Kasseem "Swizz Beatz" Dean is a Grammy-award winning music producer, DJ, and innovator.

He began collecting in the late 1990s and later founded The Dean Collection, an ever-evolving contemporary family collection and cultural platform, with his wife Alicia Keys. The collection actively acquires, and commissions, work by contemporary visual artists such as Derrick Adams, Nina Chanel Abney, Jordan Casteel, Nick Cave, Arthur Jafa, KAWS, Deana Lawson, Ebony G. Patterson, Kehinde Wiley, and many others.

The collection also includes the largest privately-owned body of work by Gordon Parks. The platform organizes supportive initiatives such as the No Commission art and music festival and TDC 20, both designed to fund artists' practices and projects.

Dean sits on the board of trustees of the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Americas Foundation of the Serpentine Galleries, London.

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