I remember vividly walking through the Detroit Institute of Arts six years ago and finding myself face to face with Kehinde Wiley’s inimitable work, “Officer of the Hussars.” It is an enormous, masterful painting, in which Wiley swapped the stereotypical white Napoleonic European cavalry officer for a Black man mounted on the same horse. He sits in a white athletic tank top, jeans and Timberland boots, wielding a sabre, looking back confidently at the viewer from the rearing horse. I stood for a few minutes, taking in the painting, when a young Black boy, maybe 10 or 12 years old, and his mother walked up to the painting. I watched him as he scanned the huge piece, and looked up at his mother to ask, “Why is he on the horse?”
Wiley’s painting centers a Black man in a place he’s not traditionally been depicted or included. It’s a fitting metaphor for where we find ourselves now, in the middle of a historic racial reckoning following the killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, which has forced many people to consider what kind of Detroit they want to live in, and how to re-imagine it.
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