Obama portraits raise eyebrows
Former President Barack Obama’s official portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery was unveiled last week. Since then, the portrait and its artist, Kehinde Wiley, have, shall we say, started tongues wagging.
The portrait has a serious, handsome Obama seated in a chair that appears to be floating in a wall of greenery and flowers.
The former president, at the unveiling, noted that he and Wiley had American mothers and African fathers and that neither of their fathers was active in their lives.
Then he said, “what I was always struck by when I saw [Wiley’s] portraits was the degree to which they challenged our ideas of power and privilege.”