This oil portrait by Kehinde Wiley is titled 'Shantavia Beale II."
New York-based portrait artist Kehinde Wiley will deliver a talk on Wednesday, Nov. 11, at 7:30 p.m. at E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall at 198 Hill St., on The University of Akron campus. The event, which is free and open to the public, is presented by The Mary Schiller Myers Lecture Series with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Kehinde Wiley
A native of Los Angeles, Wiley has been painting since early childhood. He is considered a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres and others. Wiley “engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men and women found throughout the world.”
Wiley earned a BFA at the San Francisco Art institute and an MFA at the Yale University School of Art. His work has been seen in solo and group exhibitions across the country and around the world, from New York and Texas to Oregon and California, and from London to Paris and Berlin. Wiley has received many honors for his art — most recently, the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts in 2015 and the Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award for Artistic Achievement in 2014. Learn more about the artist.
Established and endowed in 1979, the Mary Schiller Myers Lecture Series brings nationally and internationally acclaimed leaders in the performing and visual arts and communication to The University of Akron for short residencies, master classes, critiques and performances. Visit UA’s Mary Schiller Myers School of Art online.
Media contact: Lisa Craig, 330-972-7429 or lmc91@uakron.edu.