Of the Blue Cup

Kehinde Wiley has built one of the most distinctive practices in contemporary art by reclaiming the visual language of European Old Master portraiture for Black men and women who have historically been excluded from its traditions. His large-scale canvases place contemporary subjects — often young Black men encountered on city streets — in poses drawn directly from canonical works by Titian, Rubens, and Van Dyck, set against intricate, jewel-toned floral backgrounds that reference wallpaper, textiles, and ornamental painting traditions from multiple cultures. The collision of historical authority and present-day presence is both opulent and politically charged.\n\nOf the Blue Cup engages Wiley's characteristic approach of reframing Western art history's iconography through a contemporary lens. Working in a tradition that spans religious painting and secular portraiture, Wiley elevates his subjects with the same grandeur, dignity, and formal splendor that Renaissance and Baroque masters reserved for nobility and saints. His work has entered major museum collections worldwide and gained widespread public recognition when he was commissioned to paint the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 2018.