Reshaping the Monumental

A short documentary for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, edited around Kehinde Wiley’s reckoning with monumentality, visibility, and the representation of Black bodies. The piece connects Wiley’s South Central Los Angeles origins to the emotional scale of “An Archaeology of Silence,” using interviews with the artist, his twin brother Taiwo Wiley, and fellow artist Mickalene Thomas.

The edit balances biography, criticism, and the physical presence of the work without over-explaining the paintings. Interview passages are paced against studio texture, location material, and direct artwork studies, giving the film room to move from personal history into the larger questions of power, grief, beauty, and who gets pictured at monumental scale.