Kehinde Wiley: ‘I took the DNA of William Morris and created hybrids’

While growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, the Nigerian-American artist Kehinde Wiley, 42, discovered the work of the 19th-century British textile designer, writer and social reformer William Morris.

“He’s not so well known in the US,” he says. “But my mom was what you might call a junk dealer. [Her store] wasn’t really an antique store, but it sold second-hand furniture, oftentimes from old estates. So as a kid, I grew up seeing a lot of floral patterns, some Morris-inspired, some actual Morris pieces, among the stuff she was selling. And from very early in my life, there was this ornate sensibility inscribed.”

Though Wiley has diversified into film and sculpture (his 8.5m-high equestrian bronze Rumors of War was recently installed in Richmond, Virginia. It echoes the city’s monument to the Confederate general JEB Stuart, whom Wiley replaced with an African-American man in a hoodie and jeans), he is best known for his paintings of people, notably the official portrait of Barack Obama in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.

In it the 44th President of the United States, dressed in an open-necked shirt, his posture relaxed, sits amid a dense tangle of intricately painted foliage and flowers. It’s a backdrop, says Wiley, he could never have painted “without an interest in the William Morris style of block printing”.

Over the past decade he’s included literal representations of several familiar Morris designs – Honeysuckle, Iris, Blackthorn and Granada among them – in his portraits, though in Wiley’s hands the colours can be clashingly vibrant. “And it was only after working with that sort of decorative style that I began to take the DNA of Morris and build upon it to create hybrids of my own, these kind of all-over patterns that feel random and chaotic as opposed to that very rational order you see in traditional Morris prints.”

It’s appropriate, then, that his first solo show in a UK museum, a survey of portraits of women, will be at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, northeast London.

Though he’s painted celebrities from Michael Jackson to the rapper Mahogany Jones, none of the sitters in this new body of work are well known. He recruited them one afternoon, in Dalston, east London, where he and a team of assistants spent an afternoon scouting, “mostly in marketplaces”, where drawn by “their dress, attitude, looks, carriage or charisma,” they approached a succession of “complete strangers. We would show them examples of my paintings,” he says. “And I would just plead my case. For some it was an immediate yes, and for others it was a decided no. But I think what you’ll see is a kind of cross-section of the community.”

The title of the show, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a reference to the short story by the American feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a friend of Morris’s daughter, May, in which a woman suffering from what she calls a “nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” finds her condition exacerbated by the wallpaper – “one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” – on the walls of the bedroom in which she finds herself sequestered.

Published in 1892, four years before Gilman met the Morrises, it’s a work, says Wiley, that “explores the contours of femininity and insanity” and made a big impression on him when he read it as an art student at the San Francisco Art Institute, from which he went on to Yale.

What fascinated him were “the correlations, for me at least, between the sense of powerlessness and the sense of invention that happens in a person who’s not seen, who’s not respected and whose sense of autonomy is in question,” he says. “These same issues can be seen in conversations concerning race and class. In Perkins Gilman’s case it was to do with gender, but it made me want to explore the [effects of] different types of confinement. And the story provides the perfect foil for that.” Not least because the wallpaper plays a part, too. “That’s right,” he says. “The show will be a coming together of so many different impulses.”

Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper, runs from 22 February to 25 May at the William Morris Gallery, London E17 (wmgallery.org.uk)