The cultural politics of worldmaking practice: Kehinde Wiley's cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Contemporary African-American artist Kehinde Wiley recasts Old Master paintings with contemporary black models and other denizens of the Global South in a stylized interrogation of the historical legacy of fine art. By conceptualizing Wiley's portraiture as a practice of worldmaking, I will argue that his work reconfigures the relationship between visual culture and subjectivity, offering a powerful response to the norms of racial, gendered, and class representation inherited from modernity. Consequently, I argue, Wiley's work takes part in an evolving discourse of cosmopolitanism that extends the ongoing work of Paul Gilroy, Anthony Appiah, Monica Miller, Simon Gikandi, and others to imagine modernity, blackness, and diaspora as interrelated phenomena on a planetary scale.

Keywords:

• visual culture
• masculinity
• worldmaking
• performance
• diaspora

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.