Shrine to my Brothers

This weekend I experienced an amazing exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art by Kehinde Wiley titled Passing/Posing. His work (oil on canvas) is an homage to young Black urban men. Placing his subjects on huge canvases with vibrant colors, portrayed in ways previously reserved for powerful white men and of course their possessions, is Wiley's attempt to address the absence of these images in art past and present. All of the men assuming poses like the ones found in renaissance paintings, imposing, confident and at times disturbing in their intensity. The exhibit is separated by rooms, the last being set up like a chapel with rich velvet cloths draping the entrance. Paintings resembling the stained glass windows found in a cathedral adorned the walls with a four paneled fresco suspended from the ceiling. The installation invoked a quiet reverence to the space. A quasi-shrine to the "Invisible Man" Ralph Ellison writes about. A man so invisible that "the man" they call president used the fact that Black men have a shorter life span than white men to justify (to a group of Black leaders no less) that as a good reason to "reform" Social Security as we know it. I mean if your not gonna live long enough to collect it what's the point...right. Rather than address the real issue as to Why are Black men dying before the age of 65? or How do we change what has created this disparity in the first place?, it's taken as status quo. No purchase given to... I dunno reforming health care maybe or to stop making the white male the primary focus of any major disease research. Passing/Posing is as much a shrine to Black urban males as it is a testament to the privilege of white skin and the continued invisibility of Black men in amerikkka. I am happy to have seen this work by Wiley but I wish it was not necessary...