©2018 KEHINDE WILEY
Time has released its annual “Time 100” list, which brings together a group of the most influential artists, leaders, and pioneers each year. The 2018 list includes several notable members for the world of art and architecture.
Among those who appear on the list is Kehinde Wiley, the artist who painted the official portrait of Barack Obama, which was unveiled earlier this year at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. “Some consider him irreverent; I see an iconoclast,” the rapper LL Cool J, who has previously sat for one of the artist’s portraits, noted in his write-up about Wiley. “Some of his subjects come from hip-hop culture, but he’s not a hip-hop painter. To put it simply, he does dope sh-t.”
Other notable members of the art world named in the “Time 100” are Elizabeth Diller, the architect whose firm is currently working on a renovation and expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Judy Chicago, whose landmark feminist installation The Dinner Party was the subject of an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum last year; and JR, whose work along the US-Mexico border have shined a light on issues related to immigration and who recently co-directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Faces Places with Agnès Varda.
But there were also artists who contributed writing to the list, and one was Takashi Murakami, who offered kind words about his former collaborator Virgil Abloh, the new artistic director of Louis Vuitton. Murakami said of the Ghanaian designer, “With his appointment as artistic director for Louis Vuitton’s menswear, his full merit will be understood even more widely around the globe.”