“Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley”

Often given pride of place in the Brooklyn Museum’s lobby, Kehinde Wiley's Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps from 2005 is a vivid re-conception of Jacques-Louis David’s 1801 masterpiece of the same name. In his version, Wiley has supplanted the image of the French Emperor on horseback with that of a young, similarly posed African-American man dressed in street-smart regalia. Now the two magisterial canvases go mano-a-mano, as David’s original travels from France to hang alongside Wiley’s meditation on how notions of race, power and masculinity influence portraiture and the writing of history.