Black Light

Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley's first monograph consists of larger-than-life figures that disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young men. His models, attired in everyday clothing, assume poses found in paintings representative of the history of their surroundings, immediately producing a discourse that is at once visceral and cerebral in scope. Illus., 20 four-color images. 56p.