Antique

"Willem van Heythuysen," 2005. Oil and enamel on canvas. Wiley says his subjects pick their poses from art history books — as in this take on an old Dutch painting.

Katherine Wetzel/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts



Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Wiley says he fell in love with classical art as a young child.



The Two Sisters, 2012. Wiley says he wants to see black and brown bodies depicted in the visual vocabulary he learned as a young art student.

Jason Wyche/Courtesy of Sean Kelly/Copyright Kehinde Wiley



Arms of Nicolas Ruterius, Bishop of Arras, 2014. Wiley works in many traditional media, including oil, bronze sculpture, and here, stained glass.

Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris/Copyright Kehinde Wiley



The exhibit (visible in the foreground is 2008's Femme piquée par un serpent) closes this week in Brooklyn. It travels to Fort Worth, Texas, in September, then on to Seattle and Richmond next year.

This week, the Brooklyn Museum is wrapping up its mid-career retrospective of artist Kehinde Wiley — which means 14 years of work and something like 60 paintings.

It's been drawing a diverse and large crowd, partly because Wiley's work has been featured on the TV show Empire, and partly because he is a well-known and, in some ways, controversial figure in the art world. Wiley takes contemporary figures — oftentimes young black men and women — and places them in old European art traditions: Oil paintings, portraits, stained glass and even bronze sculpture.

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