🎶 mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of Obama’s portrait aesthetic 🎶

BRB, preparing mine eyes for the visual gorgeosity that is sure to be Obama’s official presidential portrait, which will be painted by the incredible Kehinde Wiley — “a genius hip-hop portraitist” that everyone should have had the sheer pleasure of studying in art history*.

If you aren’t yet familiar, the NYT has a great slideshow of Wiley’s work and a profile here, and below is a tl;dr excerpt to drive home just how magnificently subversive and on-point for Obama this choice of an artist is:

“A Wiley painting is easy to recognize. More often than not, it shows a solitary figure, an attractive man in his 20s, enacting a scene from an old-master painting. Dressed in contemporary garb — a hooded sweatshirt, perhaps, or a Denver Broncos jersey — the man might be crossing the Swiss Alps on horseback with the brio of Napoleon or glancing upward, prophet-style, golden light encircling his head.”

God, this going to be so fucking cool. Using portraiture, one of the oldest (and traditionally whitest) mediums of documenting history, to capture the legacy of our first black president was always gonna be interesting, but now it’ll be absolutely sensational. Anyone game to camp out at the Portrait Gallery on opening night w/me??

*s/o to my man prof. Van Dyke.

Like Deez Links? Forward to someone crossing the alps on horseback.