Last week, I introduced the second graders to the work of artist Kehinde Wiley. Wiley is known for his photo realistic portraits of people of color, from his neighborhood posed in classical positions. He has taken this idea onto a world stage, finding strangers on the streets of various countries to ask if he can paint them. I told students that they can find his art work in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and asked them to think why Wiley might want to put people he knows, or strangers from different countries into these paintings? Then, played a clip from CBS Sunday Morning, where Wiley explains that he loves these famous European paintings, but never saw a reflection of himself in them, so he's creating a space for it in his artwork.
Students learned that they will create a self portrait, and we started with the background first. Inspired by Wiley's work which stems from his interest in African textiles and Islamic architecture, they created a stencil of something from nature and traced and repeated it to fill the background.
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