Opening Night with Artist Kehinde Wiley
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
00:00
Painting the Black Body in Oil Painting
I think where you do start to grow is in high school. All of my teachers and classmates back then would ask me, why are you always painting black people? They'd never interrogated the fact that painting whiteness was the sort of normative state of affairs. And so I'm talking about the body that I navigate the world with. The way in which we learn how to paint black bodies in oil painting in a classical tradition is a completely new phenomenon. It's interesting though to note that the learning of color as it relates to the black body was learned within a teacher who happened not to be black.
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