User:RonGray06/sandbox

His portraits are based on photographs of young men whom Wiley sees on the street. He painted men from Harlem’s 125th Street, as well as the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he was born. Dressed in street clothes, his models were asked to assume poses from the paintings of Renaissance masters, such as Tiziano Vecellio and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Wiley describes his approach as "interrogating the notion of the master painter, at once critical and complicit." Wiley’s figurative paintings "quote historical sources and position young black men within that field of power.” In this manner, Wiley’s paintings fuse history and style in a unique and contemporary manner.

His work is found in many public collections throughout the world, including the Toledo Museum of Art; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia; San Antonio Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Columbus Museum of Art; the DIA - Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan; Kansas City Museum; Oak Park Public Library in Oak Park, Illinois; Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, New York; The Jewish Museum (New York) in New York, New York; High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, Arizona; Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California; Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, California; Milwaukee Art Museum; Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina, Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, and Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Wiley had a retrospective in 2016 at Seattle Art Museum.[6] In May 2017, Wiley had an exhibit, Trickster, at the Sean Kelly Gallery, NYC. The exhibit featured 11 paintings depicting contemporary black artists.