“The work that I do,” Kehinde Wiley explained to us for his Fall 2022 cover story, “is a way of engaging a deeply beautiful and terrible world and having the ability to say something about it. That allows me to feel less powerless, even though I know art has no revolutionary capacity at its core, it’s entirely revolutionary.” We reflected on those words as we toured the US premiere of his monumental body of work, An Archaeology of Silence, which opens at the de Young Museum in San Francisco this weekend.
