Artist Kehinde Wiley painted Obama’s recently unveiled portrait.
The NYT loooooooves it.
Barack Obama’s portrait shows him not as a self-assured, standard-issue bureaucrat, but as an alert and troubled thinker.
Michelle Obama’s portrait overemphasizes an element of couturial spectacle, but also projects a rock-solid cool. https://t.co/tTJuIGWa4d
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 12, 2018
OMG SO ARTSY.
But um… let’s be real here….
Note to presidential portrait artists: try not to go for the “Colin in the Secret Garden” feel pic.twitter.com/ld5JKYyvzq
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 12, 2018
Seriously. What’s going on here?
It’s kinda weird, ok?
Speaking of weird… the artist has an “interesting” little habit of beheading white women in her work.
According to the Daily Caller:
Former President Barack Obama’s portrait painter once depicted a black woman holding the cutoff head of a white woman in a reimagining of a story from the book of Judith.
Kehinde Wiley, the painter of Obama’s portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, reimagined the story of Judith beheading Holofernes from the deuterocanonical Book of Judith as a black woman beheading a white woman years ago.
“It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing,” Wiley told New York Magazine previously.
Judith Beheading Holofernes by Kehinde Wiley #wow #wileyrva #vmfa
A post shared by Anne Lane Witt (@annelanewitt) on
LOVELY.
And no, it’s not a fluke…
She’s really, really in to this:
A post shared by Kehinde Wiley (@kehindewiley) on
Many of Wiley’s paintings usually envision black people at the forefront of historical events, as “the whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.”
WONDERFUL.
Nothing to see here, right?
Only… think of it this way.
Let’s say Trump had his portrait done…
Then we all found out that the artist just LOVES painting white women holding severed black women’s heads.
How would that go over?
How many days would CNN spend talking about it?
Would Corey Booker pretend to cry?