For Immediate Release: Rumors of War Installed at Richmond

For Immediate Release: Rumors of War Installed at Richmond

Black “Artist’s” Work Combines Genocidal Racism with Nazi-Style Kitsch

Truth or Consequences
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Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, a towering monument to the urban black male, was installed adjacent to the Headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, yesterday.

Its insertion along newly renamed Arthur Ashe Boulevard, after the black tennis player, lays bare the intentions of what Governor Ralph Northam calls “the new and progressive Virginia.”

Wiley’s 27-foot tall depiction of an archetypal 2019 African American with dreadlocks gathered in a man bun, and dressed in a hoodie and torn jeans, is all of 600 yards away from Richmond’s tree-lined Monument Avenue.

Many of Richmond’s seven million annual visitors come to see its architecturally significant homes and tributes to Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and the President of the Confederate States Jefferson Davis.

Prior to its arrival in Virginia, Rumors of War made its debut in lower Manhattan in late September.

Sponsored there by the Times Square Alliance, Wiley’s work aimed to “promote and cultivate the creativity, energy, and edginess that have made the area iconic.” Members of Newark, New Jersey's Malcolm X. Shabazz High School’s marching band and twerking cheerleaders were on hand for the unveiling.

To historians, staid Richmond is remembered most for the House of Burgess, the first legislative assembly in America, and for its role as capitol of the Confederacy, 1861-1865. It would on its surface appear incongruous for Wiley to want his ode to the modern black man there, and that's the rub.

It is meant to be confrontational, as Wiley explained today to Anthony Mason at CBS This Morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGb9AQd0Ib4

Artist Kehinde Wiley's new statue is "speaking back" to those looking at Confederate monuments





CBS This Morning

Many people across the South are fighting to take down statues of Confederate heroes. But a new monument in Richmond, Virginia, the formal capital of the Confederacy, sends a very different message. Anthony Mason spoke to the artist, Kehinde Wiley, who says he wants to create a new narrative. Watch "CBS This Morning"

Wiley, 42, first burst into the national consciousness when former President Barack Obama commissioned the gay Angeleno to supply the National Portrait Gallery with his likeness.

His work was presented at the Smithsonian Institute along with Amy Sherald’s rendering of Michele Obama, February 12, 2018. An adoring press jammed a conference room where Wiley suggested the floral background reflected Obama’s “Hawaiian heritage.”

Art enthusiasts quickly identified Wiley for his earlier interpretations of the Biblical Jewess Judith beheading an enemy soldier. In two pieces Wiley showed stern-faced black women grasping the hair of beheaded white women.

When asked about their confrontational nature, Wiley said they were intended to show the fury and righteousness of the modern black woman and were a “play on the kill whitey thing.”

Mason obviously bypassed these details at CBS This Morning, but might white America snap out of its collective coma at this latest indignity?