"Kehinde Wiley’s Catholic Imaginary" in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (2 October 2016)

Artist Kehinde Wiley’s A New Republic offers a way to think about art and history as reflections on public culture. 

My longest held memory of the brown-cassocked St. Anthony is of that time on a school holiday when my grandmother made me kneel in front of the altar because I had stayed out longer than usual. She had frantically been asking of passers-by if they had seen her errant grandson. Oblivious, I sauntered back home and was promptly dragged to the shrine in her room. “Tell St. Anthony you’re sorry”, she ordered. Later, I would come to realise that the dear old lady, like so many Catholic Goans, held the tonsured Franciscan in such high esteem for the faith she placed in him as the finder of lost things, naughty lads included. A couple of weeks ago in the American city of Richmond, I encountered St. Anthony again at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art exhibition, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, and he looked very different from my childhood memory. 

In Wiley’s canvas, “Anthony of Padua” (2013), he is a young Black man with closely cropped hair. He wears an octopus pendant on a chain and is adorned in a military green jacket with patches. One of these decorative circles bears the image of a snarling black panther, a symbol suggestive of the Black Power movement of 1960s’ America. Cradled in the crook of his left arm is a book instead of the Child Jesus. His raised right hand holds a rod in place of the traditional stalk of lilies. In this pose, it is as if the saint is a painter, with palette and brush, taking in his subject. Behind him, flowers swirl, some of them encircling his waist, others set in relief against his teal-coloured trousers. Through it all, no Jesus to behold, the modern-day Anthony looks upon his viewers with an expression of deep composure. Haughtiness, even. His gaze breaks the fourth wall between the dramatic portrait and its spectators, between the exalted and the mundane. 

Reminiscent of the methods of Goan painter Angelo da Fonseca (1902-1967), the American Wiley employs ordinary people as subjects in depicting themes that evoke the Renaissance, French Rococo, and other Western periods of art, as well as European Christian iconography. Where da Fonseca used South Asian models, including his wife Ivy, to render Christian imagery, Wiley’s muses of choice are everyday Black Americans. In both cases, these artists’ works subvert Eurocentric conceptions of the sacred, by challenging implicit assumptions of race and class in the idealisation of the divine. Moreover, their images alter public culture by demonstrating that the faithful come in many hues and from various economic backgrounds, for the icons in their art are just regular folk. If such art is to be taken as political statement, then Wiley’s reverential presentation of Blackness resonates powerfully with the Black Lives Matter movement in today’s United States where serious questions are being asked about the police killings of Black men and women.

Wiley’s St. Anthony is inspired by the representation of the saint in the 1842-1843 stained glass window created by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres for the Chapelle St. Ferdinand in Porte des Ternes, Paris. Christian imagery appears elsewhere in Wiley’s oeuvre, including in his own stained glass windows, which again characterise young Black men in contemporary garb as saints. At the Virginia exhibition, museum patrons would have walked through a dark chapel-like gallery, where these back-lit windows and other elements of iconography would have been on display. They would then emerge into a brightly lit space where they would witness various canvasses from the artist’s World Stage series, including pieces from his Indian and Sri Lankan collections. 

In Kehinde Wiley – The World Stage: India-Sri Lanka (2011), critic Gayatri Sinha wonders if Wiley’s South Asian works challenge orientalised notions of the region, but concludes that he “instead pushes for a different dimension of recognition”, especially because the artist “takes young men of the street and accord[s] them a heroic cast … [A]ny one of them could be an unemployed youth familiar from the streets of Bombay or Bangalore. Or they could be Goa’s beach boys, car cleaners from the streets of Tamil Nadu, or young advisasis (tribals) serving in the capital’s diplomatic enclave” (pp. 7-8). To say that Sinha lets slip her class and caste biases would be to state the obvious. Indeed, what Sinha fails to acknowledge is the very divide that Wiley seeks to breach in placing paintings of young men of the street, beach boys, car cleaners, and “tribals” in the elite (or is that elitist?) spaces of the art gallery and the museum. In saying that these subjects are recognisable, Sinha implies their objectification by the Indian art patron. This othering is intensified when the critic does not question why Wiley’s subjects must exist outside these exclusive circles, while only the representation of who they are is allowed in so that it may be consumed by those with access to art.

“The European Orientalist discourse is invoked and vivified, but it also becomes the site for fresh enactments” in Wiley’s South Asia paintings, Sinha muses. Even so, it is Sinha herself who relies on an orientalised understanding of what constitutes South Asian culture when she traces a line between Wiley’s Indian scenes of “temples or prayer rooms” and “Hindu painting tradition from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries” (p. 8). Reliant solely on a British postcolonialist purview, this Brahmanical rendition of India not only eschews the Portuguese Indian legacy (except to tellingly minimise it to “Goa’s beach boys”) but also refuses to consider other faith traditions as influences in South Asian art history. 

To this end, even as Sinha sees Wiley’s representations of blackness as being linked to “histories of shared oppression” in the Afro-Asiatic context (p. 6), she is unable to connect the Catholic themes in the Nigerian American artist’s canon to South Asia. Wiley’s “Anthony of Padua” proves useful in this regard. Though St. Anthony died in Padua, Italy in 1231, he was born in Portugal in 1195. Revered around the Catholic world, his legacy took particular shape in the former Portuguese colony of Angola, where the 17^th-18^th century Kongolese prophetess and anti-colonial revolutionary Kimpa Vita claimed to be a medium for his spirit. 

In the novel Skin (2001), based on the Portuguese Afro-Asiatic slave trade, Margaret Mascarenhas transports the enslaved progeny of the real life Kimpa Vita to Goa. The novel’s magical realism manifests, among other things, in the form of the prophetess’ Goan descendants being able to shape-shift into black panthers. That the black panther appears as an emblem on St. Anthony’s jacket in Wiley’s painting is coincidental. However, what is not is how Wiley’s Catholic imaginary transcends space and time, in much the same way as a 12^th-13^th century Portuguese saint shape-shifts into a Black person in African history and in African American art. Here, one figure is not meant to replace the other; rather, what is to be contended with is why one is not as revered as the other. It is through this palette of complexities that Kehinde Wiley envisions a new republic, even as he questions its borders.

From The Goan.

"Is Milk in my Coffee a Racial Metaphor?" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (21 March 2015)

I fear my skillset has been rendered redundant and that all prospects for my employability have been lost. What has given rise to this panic, you ask? The announcement that the American coffee company Starbucks, which boasts a global presence, has now positioned itself as an expert on race. Earlier this week, the company announced that it was going to initiate a programme called “Race Together”, wherein baristas at 12,000 Starbucks locations across the United States would engage patrons in conversations about race. Who knew that all it would take to end oppression was a nice chat over a cup of coffee? And what does this say for those of us who work on race-related issues, but are no good at making a decent cup of joe?

When I acquired my Masters in Asian American Studies from UCLA, it was with the awareness that that degree was conferred upon me by an educational entity that had been borne out of the political struggle of the US Civil Rights movement. Indeed, the legendary Campbell Hall where my MA programme shared space with other Ethnic Studies centres, such as the Native American, African American, and Chicano Studies programmes, was the site where John Huggins and Bunchy Carter – members of the Black Panther Party who were UCLA students – had been slain in 1969. It would be revealed that the FBI had had a hand in the murders. 

Thanks to my MA in the study of race, I went on to acquire work where I could analyse how effective high school programmes were at catering to the specific learning needs of multicultural student bodies. And, in case you were wondering, the answer is not very well. But as simply rendered as that answer seems, it was arrived at after a great deal of data-collection and analysis at my first post-graduate school job, which was with the Los Angeles Unified School District. The team I was part of hoped that in answering that question, which seemed like a foregone conclusion anyway, that the way would be paved to bring about necessary educational changes. This, not least because Los Angeles is a city where, as US census data indicates, the birth rate among minority groups has outstripped that of whites. Now, imagine having that kind of conversation while buying your cup of coffee as you try to make it to work on time in the morning!

Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t a putdown of the capabilities of baristas to, both, get your day started on the right note with a much needed caffeine boost and to aid dialogue that could foster community relations. In fact, coffeehouses have quite the history of being the sites of information exchange, hotbeds of revolution even. Take the European coffeehouses of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, for example, where people gathered precisely because those were the spaces where news could be sought and conversations had. And these were not always genteel affairs. On 12 July, 1789, Camille Desmoulins stood atop a table at the Café de Foy, shouting out a call to arms while, himself, waving two pistols in the air. “Aux armes, citoyens!” he is believed to have proclaimed, a moment that would go down in history as the precursor to the fall of the Bastille a mere two days after. Something tells me that, in this day and age, getting one’s non-fat soy latte at Starbucks is not going to inspire the same kind of fervour… 

To be fair, however, it has less to do with political apathy than with what Starbucks itself has come to represent. Arguably, the popularity of Starbucks lies in its sheer ubiquity rather than in the quality or taste of its coffee. In most major American cities, one is guaranteed to find a Starbucks location (or three) in the most well-trafficked spots, and even in less frequented areas. Like McDonald’s, it’s the place you go because you know they probably have a restroom you could use without necessarily having to buy something. To discuss race relations? A less likely choice. 

Even as Starbucks rolls out the #RaceTogether programme, little has been said about what the company has done to educate its baristas on the most pressing of racial concerns in the United States today. Without judging the intelligence of the person who makes my coffee, I expect them to know how to do precisely that and not to need to entertain queries I have about why white cops can kill unarmed black people and be acquitted for crimes of that nature. Honestly, it’s probably hard enough dealing with customers desperately in need of a cuppa ahead of going into a soul-crushing job without also having to make believe that talking about race is as simple as creating a hashtag.

From The Goan.