The U.S. State Department is considering selling a painting by artist Kehinde Wiley that it removed from a U.S. embassy in the Dominican Republic. The work, titled “Young Artists after Siamesas 1960,” was taken down after concerns were raised internally about how it would be perceived.
According to reporting across outlets, the department’s Art in Embassies program had commissioned the painting in 2013. One outlet describes the removal as tied to the artist’s connection to widely circulated U.S. political imagery, noting Wiley also created the official portrait of Barack Obama. Another account highlights that a program director publicly characterized the work with the terms “woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.”
Outlets differ mainly in emphasis: one focuses on the painting’s removal and its potential to be resold, another foregrounds the “woke” language used by a senior program official, and another adds context about the artist’s prominence through the Obama portrait. All accounts describe the same painting, the same embassy, and the same shift from display to possible sale.
