Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Residency Brings Rising Stars to Senegal for Second Iteration

Black Rock Senegal, the residency program established by artist Kehinde Wiley, has revealed the artists who will travel to the West African city of Dakar, Senegal, for the 2021 program. The sixteen participants come from across the globe, and represent a myriad of practices spanning painting, sculpture, film, and writing. They will receive room and board, as well as individual studio space and a stipend, as they spend several weeks in the artist’s lavish studio along the volcanic rock-lined shore which lends the residency its name.

Wiley, best known as the painter of President Obama’s official portrait, relies on Old Masters styles to offer urgent commentaries on Blackness in the U.S. Among his recent works are a hand-painted stained-glass fresco of break dancers in New York’s new Moynihan Train Hall and Rumors of War, a statue in Richmond, Virginia, depicting a Black man in streetwear mounted on horseback—a rebuttal to the city’s controversial Confederate monuments.

He launched Black Rock Senegal in 2019, describing it at the time as a “direct answer to my desire to have an uncontested relationship with Africa, the filling in of a large void that I share with many African Americans.”