WATCH THE THRONE

Kehinde Wiley built an empire out of painting young Black men into art history. Can it survive accusations of sexual assault?

- Rachel Corbett

Kehinde Wiley in his studio in August.

DERRICK INGRAM, A WELL-KNOWN Black Lives Matter activist, was hanging out in a private party room at the Soho Grand one night in 2021 when, as he remembers it, a man approached and offered to buy him a drink. Ingram, then 29, tall and muscular, recalls that the man wasn’t really his type—he was “older, short, heavyset,” with a big gap-toothed smile. Ingram declined the drink. “He just wasn’t doing anything for me.”

Over the course of the night, Ingram noticed how people were lingering around the man and taking turns speaking to him. “Everybody’s attention was on him in the room,” he says. As the party wound down, the man cut through the crowd to again offer Ingram a drink. This time they had a conversation and Ingram realized that “he had a level of charisma that was just out of this world,” he says. “I was like, Oh, I want to get to know him.”

He learned that the man was the artist Kehinde Wiley, then 44, who had risen to international fame in the mid-aughts for paintings that replace images of the heroic white men of art history—like Napoleon astride a stallion in Jacques-Louis David’s portrait— with young Black men in streetwear. Ingram wasn’t familiar with Wiley’s work until he discovered that he was also the artist behind that “beautiful” presidential portrait of Barack Obama seated against a wall of lush, green leaves.

Ingram’s and Wiley’s accounts of what happened next diverge dramatically. In Ingram’s version, they went home together that night and then stayed at Wiley’s Soho loft for nearly a week: “We hit it off, and he didn’t want me to leave.” Ingram remembers the apartment was “very artistic and extravagant” but also “absolutely trashed and chaotic.”