I am not sure that any art exhibit has taken my breath away quite like the exhibit of Black American Portraits at LACMA in 2022. Like most of the crowd, I had gone to see the already-iconic Obama portraits by artist Kehinde Wiley—that alone was well-worth the wait. But beyond those two spectacular portraits were over 150 other pieces of art, featuring 200 years of Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. The goal was, according to LACMA’s publicity, “centering Black love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance.” Among them were a number, that I recall, portraying ordinary Black Americans as royalty—a common theme in Kehinde Wiley’s work.

So, imagine my surprise to discover that in 2012—long before the Obama portraits—the Jewish Museum in New York mounted a Kehinde Wiley exhibit for Black History month entitled Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel. The description of the exhibit offers the following:

Kehinde Wiley / The World Stage: Israel features Wiley’s portraits of Israeli men of diverse backgrounds: Ethiopian-Israeli Jews, native-born Jews, and Arab-Israelis. Like the other bodies of work in The World Stage series, Wiley depicted local youth culture in a country with unique political and historical importance. For his Israeli works, he embedded each contemporary portrait in a background inspired by traditional Jewish ceremonial papercuts. For this painting of Alios Itzhak, Wiley adapted a cut-out nineteenth-century Ukrainian mizrah from the Jewish Museum collection as the background for the figure. Representing minorities as royalty, Wiley reclaims the beauty and pride so often denied to the black, gay, and Jewish communities.

I wish I had seen this exhibit, and would love to have heard Wiley’s reflections on that particular project, as the complexities of Israeli society and ethnicity are both endlessly fascinating and challenging.

But more than that, I also love Wiley’s own description of his work, which appears on his website. He writes that his portraits challenge and reorient art-historical narratives, awakening complex issues that many would prefer remain muted. While Wiley is certainly not Jewish—nor is his art—that goal resonates so deeply with me, as a student of Jewish history and especially text. What is our religious interpretive tradition if not one of challenging and reorienting historical narratives, of confronting complex issues, and giving voice to that which might be easier to keep muted?

— Rabbi Sari Laufer