It was with good fortune that we found ourselves in Northern California last week with an open day to venture into the BIG CITY to see Kehinde Wiley’s work, “An Archaeology of Silence,” at the de Young Museum. Many thanks to our Yountville Hosts, Michael and Kathy, for procuring tickets. You may know Wiley’s work from his portrait of President Barack Obama from 2018.
In this stunning exhibit Wiley investigates and questions how death and sacrifice have been portrayed across art history through a series of works that confront the silence surrounding systemic violence against Black people. According to the New York Times, Wiley made the pieces, an extension of his body of work called “Down,” in the months following the 2020 killing of George Floyd while in police custody. At the time, the artist was waiting out the pandemic at his studio in Dakar, Senegal, and said the pieces were meant to reflect not only American brutality but also the effects of colonialism on Africans. Some of his models were Senegalese men and women whose names appear in parentheses in the titles of the pieces.
“I wanted to create an American story that can be appreciated by all parts of the globe,” Wiley said on a recent afternoon in his sprawling Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studio, where various works-in-progress were propped against one long wall. “In America, to be honest, there’s a different type of relevance.”
If you have the opportunity, see this show!
And due to popular request—OK, just David Mendoza—here are some more images soaking up the goodness of Sea Ranch on the Northern California coast. There’s a certain archaeology of silence walking the coastline, as well.
And now…
Dreamy - all of it. Kaz
💝to it all.