Kehinde Wiley will participate in a special collaboration with Interscope Records in celebration of their 30th anniversary. For this project, Interscope commissioned 30 artists to reimagine the covers of iconic albums produced by the record label since its inception. Kehinde created a portrait of Dr. Dre for the re-release of a limited edition run of his album 2001. The resulting painting will be on show at Los Angeles County Museum of Art from January 30 – February 13, 2022 as part of the exhibition “Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined.”

In this exhibition, Kehinde Wiley shifts his focus from one European tradition - Grand Manner portraiture – to another – landscape painting. Through new artworks, including film and painting, Wiley looks at European Romanticism and its focus on epic scenes of oceans and mountains, building relationships with our collection of historical landscapes and seascapes by Turner, Claude, Vernet and Friedrich. Like his work before, this new work will look back at Old Masters as a way to create new connections and raise fresh questions.

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, a Ghanaian painter, is one of the Rubell Museum’s 2021 Artists-in-Residence. Quaicoe creates empowering lush portraits of his family and friends where color and texture functions as a unique language to represent the character of the subject. During his time at the Rubell Museum, Quaicoe explored the phenomenon of twin births through double portraiture, on view in this exhibition.

Featuring Wangari Mathenge, Otis Kwame Kye Quiacoe, Betye Saar and Kehinde Wiley

To complement the presentation of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald on tour from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), LACMA presents Black American Portraits. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces.

ICA Miami presents a survey of rarely exhibited immersive, site-specific installations from 1980 to 1998 by Betye Saar. Rooted in the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and intersectional feminism as well as the racialized and gendered connotations of found objects, Saar’s installations expand on her celebrated repertoire and offer broadened insight into ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies in relation to the African American experience and the African diaspora. Saar’s intimately scaled works of the 1960s and 1970s–poignant examinations of race and gender through assemblages of readymades and found objects–became icons of Black feminist art.

Curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah
Presented in partnership with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 

Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks, is the premier museum solo exhibition for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo. The show is a presentation of over 20 works created between 2018-2021. Soul of Black Folks is a timely exploration into the varying strategies that Boafo employs within his practice to capture the essence of the Black figure.

This exhibition concerns the intersections of four powerful words—INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE. The two outer terms suggest boundless spaces and generative, tender relationships. The two interior terms convey markers of identity that Jeffrey Gibson disassembles and reconstructs through his artistic practice as a queer Choctaw-Cherokee man. Altogether this title offers a bold, declarative framework for this exhibition which debuts a series of collages, an immersive display featuring three hanging fringe sculptures, and recent videos created with collaborators, musicians, and performers. Shown together, these dazzling artistic expressions suggest that identity is pieced together by public life, popular culture, and intimate human bonds.

Kehinde Wiley's "A Portrait of a Young Gentleman", is now on view through January 3, 2022, at The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.  The large-scale portrait was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s "The Blue Boy" (ca. 1770).

Commissioned through Roberts Projects, the new portrait celebrates the 100th anniversary of the purchase of the Gainsborough painting by Henry and Arabella Huntington, the founders of the institution.