AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF SILENCE

Kehinde Wiley excavates unsung martyrs in the struggle against oppression in the U.S. premiere of his latest work at the de Young Museum

- MEG DALY

Propped on his elbow, a young man in a hoodie, ripped jeans and high top sneakers gasps for breath. Face down and body twisted, a young woman with long braids and a denim mini skirt breathes no more.

These bodies are found not on a street or the front page, but in an epic tableau in one of America's most esteemed museums. The young man is a bronze sculpture emulating the pose of the ancient Roman sculpture, The Dying Gaul. The young woman is rendered in bronze as well as in a vibrant floral painting. She is named The Virgin Martyr Cecilia, after the Catholic saint of music.

Welcome to Kehinde Wiley's monumental new exhibition, An Archaeology of Silence, which premiered in March at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and runs through October 15. The show features over two dozen paintings and bronzes of fallen figures-elegies to Black and brown people killed in the struggle for racial justice. As with his other work, Wiley references European Old Masters, Greek mythology and Western white canonical themes and upends them by inserting Black and brown people as subjects.

About the work, Wiley has said that the archaeology he is "unearthing" is "the specter of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and brown people all over the world."

To do so, Wiley has made a dramatic shift in his storytelling tools. Rather than the grand verticality of previous works, his new works examine the horizontal plane. "This new body of work forgoes the rhetorical tools of empire that have informed his portraiture thus far," says Claudia Schmuckli, curator of Contemporary Art and Programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the umbrella organization for the de Young and Legion of Honor.