Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York. Wiley obtained a Bachelor of Fine Art from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and received his Master of Fine Art from Yale University School of Art in 2001.

In all his work, Wiley combines a range of references from classical painting and pop culture, drawing inspiration from French Rococo painting, Islamic architecture, contemporary fashion, African textile design and urban hip hop.

Wiley’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide and is in the permanent collections of many museums. Amongst these are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Denver Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Phoenix Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. In 2015, Wiley was awarded the US State Department Medal of Arts from then Secretary of State John Kerry. That same year he was the subject of a mid-career survey exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, entitled A New Republic, which continues to travel the country and is currently on view at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio.