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Kehinde Wiley
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BiographyKehinde Wiley (b. 1977) was raised in Los Angeles, California and new resides in Brooklyn, New York. After receiving his MFA from Yale in 2001 he became an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Wiley quickly found success with the 2004 exhibition of his Passing/Posing series at The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Quoting the work of past masters such as Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, he has firmly situated himself in the long tradition of Western portrait painting while simultaneously questioning that tradition through his conspicuous use of African and African American men - faces largely absent from this canon. His portraits blur boundaries between historic and contemporary modes of representation and viewing.