A New Republic at Seattle Art Museum is Kehinde Wiley’s second solo exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum. In his brief fifteen-year career, Wiley has quickly become an established cultural trope. His works have adorned the set of Empire and served as icons of the FIFA World Cup. His portraits of Black men and women are at once celebrated as a vision of Black empowerment[…..]

Museums are constantly devising new platforms to present their permanent collections. Interventions and mining-the-museum have become commonplace curatorial strategies, and institutions frequently turn to contemporary artists to animate, recontextualize, and bring visibility to canonized cultural objects. Disguise: Masks and Global African Art is Seattle Art Museum’s latest attempt to draw connections across temporal, geographic, and cultural lines. Leveraging the museum’s collection of African masks, the[…..]