Naturally, art figures prominently throughout. Modernist wood sculptures by late masters like Ben Osawe and Lamidi Olonade Fakeye mingle with pieces from Wiley’s friends, protégés, and fellow luminaries. A formidable bronze bust from the artist’s 2015 Brooklyn Museum retrospective towers over the dining area. A provocative Mickalene Thomas photograph beckons in the entryway, while a self-portrait by the Ghanaian phenom Amoako Boafo stares across the living room at a figurative work by the Nigerian rising star Collins Obijiaku. (A passionate champion of fellow artists, Wiley will soon open a second Black Rock outpost, in the southern Nigerian port city of Calabar).
Born and raised in South Central LA, Wiley first visited the continent more than two decades ago on a quest to find his father, a Nigerian professor who returned to the country before Wiley was born. After father and son reconciled, Wiley fell in love with West Africa and soon made up his mind to return as often as he could. All these years later, he remains endlessly inspired by the frenetic energy of Lagos, a bustling metropolis that’s recently found itself at the center of global culture.
“Lagos carries a twin spirit,” Wiley, himself a twin, asserts. “It wants to be a modern, well-organized economic hub, but it also wants to be a place in which every single person goes their own way. There’s this organized chaos that is defined by group structures, but also a uniquely Nigerian sense of making your own path, charting your own territory, a kind of pluck that’s resilient and festive, mournful and sorrowful, beholden to the past, but radically present, which charges your batteries. It makes you feel excited to get up and be alive.”
This tour of Kehinde…