Wiley’s portraits single out ordinary Black people for color-saturated canonization, turning spontaneous encounters on streets across the world into dates with art-historical destiny. A mother in New York might become Judith holding the head of Holofernes; a dreamy Senegalese youth, Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.” The artist revels in embodying chance, the butterfly effect that leads from everyday life to gilt-framed immortality. “In every male ejaculate there’s a possibility to populate an entire city like New York,” he told me in one of our conversations, alluding to the golden sperm that adorned his career-making portraits of young men in Harlem. “Every single person that’s around is winning some cosmic game.”
