Barack Obama's Presidential Portrait by Kehinde Wiley Is Unveiled

This morning at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama were presented with their official portraits, painted by New York–based artist Kehinde Wiley and Baltimore’s Amy Sherald, respectively. Both Mr. Wiley and Ms. Sherald seemed natural choices to paint the Obamas, who, in their eight years in the White House, worked to both modernize and diversify art on the White House walls, incorporating paintings by outsider and contemporary artists into the collection. Alma Thomas’ painting Resurrection, for example, hung in the family dining room.

Mrs. Obama’s portrait was first to be unveiled. Together with Sherald, the former first lady revealed the canvas to an eager audience that included former vice president Joe Biden, members of the Obama family, former attorney general Eric Holder, and Tom Hanks, among other celebrities and local luminaries. Sherald’s canvas, painted in shades of blue, gray, and white, presents Mrs. Obama in a manner that’s equal parts poise, grace, and power. Mrs. Obama delighted in the artwork, saying, “I’m thinking about young people, particularly . . . girls of color who will come to this place and they will look up and they will see an image of someone who looks like them on the wall.” Upon seeing the work, Mr. Obama thanked the artist for capturing his wife’s “grace, beauty, charm, and hotness.”

Mr. Obama and Mr. Wiley’s big reveal came next. Obama selected Wiley—known for his oversize baroque paintings, which largely feature people of color striking the poses of famous figures in Western art—from a portfolio of artists submitted to him by the National Portrait Gallery curators. As a child, Mr. Wiley, a Los Angeles native, delighted in seeing Kerry James Marshall’s work at LACMA, but noticed that the galleries were otherwise devoid of multicultural representation. To help right this historical wrong, the artists has devoted much of his career to carving out a place for African-American beauty, poise, dignity and power in portraiture. Over the years, he’s highlighted the diverse cultural traditions of nations ranging from Haiti to Israel to Sri Lanka; recast the subjects of Byzantine paintings, Renaissance triptychs, and biblical stained-glass windows with African-American and mixed-race models he cast ad hoc off the street; and painted pop-culture luminaries like Ice-T and LL Cool J as European aristocrats. It’s this ability, as Mr. Obama described, to “take extra ordinary care and precision in recognizing the beauty and grace of the invisible" that drew the former president to the artist.

Mr. Obama’s commanding portrait is in keeping with Wiley’s signature style and features Obama seated in a navy suit with no tie, meeting eyes with the viewer. Wiley explained that the foliage-filled background of the painting features flowers that allude to different moments in the former president’s life. Some flowers are a nod to Hawaii, while another, the violet, is the state flower of Illinois.

Mr. Obama is one of few former commanders-in-chief to call up a contemporary art star to paint his portrait. Figurative Expressionist Elaine de Kooning was tapped to paint John F. Kennedy’s likeness, and photorealist Chuck Close painted Bill Clinton, while the majority of former presidents have leaned more toward the conservative (most recently, George W. Bush selected Connecticut-based painter and former Yale classmate Robert Anderson for his portrait). But Mr. Obama is no stranger to deviating from the status quo. As Wiley pointed out, he’s the very first African-American painter chosen to paint the very first African-American president of the United States.

Both portraits will be on view beginning tomorrow: Mr. Obama’s portrait will be permanently installed in the museum’s "America’s Presidents" exhibition—the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits, outside of the White House, open to the public—and Mrs. Obama’s painting will hang in the museum’s "Recent Acquisitions" corridor through early November.