Author: Cheryl Benard

I first encountered the Incredible Kehinde Wiley on a weekend in 2003. I was living in the suburbs of Washington DC with my two sons, a middle school pupil and a recent high school graduate. My husband was overseas on an extended government assignment, and I was looking through the newspaper for events that the three of us might all enjoy. I liked art galleries and theater, but needless to say, those were not the first choice of my 12 and 19 year olds. Glancing at the page on art exhibits just for the heck of it, what did I see? Monumental Renaissance style portraits of the kind you see in the Louvre or the Viennese Museum of Kunstgeschichte. Gold frames, elaborate backgrounds, horses…but seated on the horses, or posing heroically, not kings or generals, but contemporary American basketball stars.

My first thought: clever. My second thought: at last, an art exhibit to which I could take my kids. Why this particular motif? At that moment, I didn’t really care; it resonated with my group and that was enough for me. We learned more, of course, at the gallery. This was about broadening the world of role models, beyond old white men who sat on long-gone thrones or had led armies into long-forgotten wars. Mostly, for Kehinde, it was about young black men: about giving them visibility and respect, about celebrating their bravado, their style, their presence.

We all loved Kehinde’s art, this series and his other work too, but we could never have dreamed of owning one of his pieces because a. we didn’t have any walls that size and b. we couldn’t afford it. But we came close! In 2007 when my husband was appointed US ambassador to the United Nations, we were told about a government program called “arts in the embassy.” It allowed you to borrow from participating artists and galleries for the public areas of the embassy. I lost no time requesting a Kehinde Wiley. It traveled up to the 42nd floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where the US official UN residence was then located (no more – the iconic hotel was sold to the Chinese, who are converting it into condos) by the thankfully enormous freight elevator. It covered most of one wall in the formal dining room. It was an enormous hit with all the guests, and especially with African delegations, who were delighted not just with the piece but also with the artist’s name. “Kehinde! This is a popular name in my country!” We invited a group of ambassadors to the Harlem Art Museum to see a special exhibit of Kehinde’s work, and afterwards we all had a fine Southern dinner in a highly informal local dive. The Russian ambassador was among those in attendance. All the ambassadors admitted to feelings of trepidation over an invitation to Harlem, then greatly enjoyed the experience and this glimpse into a part of America they didn’t usually see.

All these years later, I find myself standing in Times Square for yet another unusual Kehinde experience. He is unveiling a grand statue called Rumors of War. Approaching from the Flatiron district, I see it in the distance, still covered, a shimmering silver shape undulating slightly in the breeze amidst the razzle and dazzle of Times Square. An area around it has been roped off for invited guests, we are checked against a list and given red armbands and a glass of champagne. It’s exceptionally hot for late September. Kehinde is there to receive guests, looking dashing as usual in one of his signature self-designed suits out of African print cloth. His mother, a picture-perfect Southern mom, is a beloved fixture at his events. He teases her by challenging her to identify the Bible source of the name he has given his statue, “Rumors of War.”

The formal part of the unveiling ceremony provides context. Recently, heroic statues of Confederate personalities have caused great and in some cases violent controversy in the U.S. People asked why these individuals, who had been fighting to preserve the despicable institution of slavery and who wanted to divide our country into two, should still be idolized. In some locations, their statues were indeed removed. But there were also people who argued that these were core figures in the history of the Southern states; that the South was about more than just slavery and represented positive values too; or that the Civil War hadn’t been about slavery at all but about entirely different divergences of interest between the North and the South. I could go on… The one argument that did resonate with me, as a cultural heritage preservation activist, was the argument that monuments were representations of history, and erasing history was not the way to go, as in fact it was counterproductive, eliminating opportunities to explain and to learn. How instructive is it, for example, to visit the palaces of overthrown tyrants, view the absurd wealth and luxury, shake your head over their gold bathroom sink and then see photographs of how, meanwhile, their populations were starving and suffering. I felt regretful when the U.S. military, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, assisted in the demolition of his monumental statues. Did this mean that he had never ruled his country with an iron fist, using chemical warfare against his own Kurdish population? You can’t erase historic facts. You can forget them, but why would you want to do that? And eventually time will pass, then a great deal more time, and eventually some frustrated archaeologist will be trying to piece together the story of your vanished civilization, and will tear out his or her hair because you chiseled away the names and images of the rulers that for some reason somebody later was determined to eradicate – a reason that the archaeologist will now be forced to simply guess at, since you have removed the visual information.

So I was very happy to hear, during the unveiling ceremony for Rumors of War, that it takes the “additive approach.” This is the method whereby you leave a statue or other artifact in place, but add something to provide context. This is commonly done in Europe with relics of the Nazi era. You leave them in place, and then you add a plaque or another statue and you explain and honor the horrendous human cost of this dark era in your history. Rumors of War, after its cameo appearance in Times Square, is destined to go to Richmond, Virginia, the city that was the capital of the Southern Confederacy, and that is still replete with statues of various Confederate personalities.

How, we were all wondering by now, had Kehinde chosen to make his counterpoint? At last the veil came off, and our heads turned upward and upward some more. Atop an enormous marble base sat the conventional horse and its unconventional rider, an androgynous slender figure. Certainly more interesting than the run of the mill old men in uniforms, it is easy to predict that far more tourists will want to see Rumors of War, which will easily trump the avenues of Civil War leaders not only in message, but also in aesthetic appeal. (And mothers take note, this is once again an art opportunity to which you can take your young art-averse philistines.)