Kehinde Wiley wants to buy back a painting the United States government took off an embassy wall.
The work is "Young Artists After Siamesas 1960," which Wiley painted in 2015 for the US embassy in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. It was removed in August 2026. In a letter dated September 24 and released by his gallery, Sean Kelly, the artist asked President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to let him purchase it.
"If your administration no longer has a place for it, I would be grateful for the opportunity to bring it home," Wiley wrote. "The painting remains important to me, as do the people and the ideas that it represents."
How the painting got there
The canvas was commissioned through Art in Embassies, a State Department program that places American art in diplomatic buildings abroad on the theory that a wall is a cheap and durable form of cultural diplomacy. Wiley spent two years researching Dominican artists before painting it, and built the work around four local art students, whom he depicted in his signature manner: contemporary figures posed against dense floral backgrounds, borrowing the compositional grammar of European portraiture.
The title refers to Siamesas, a 1960 painting by a Dominican artist — the sort of citation the program was designed to produce, an American painter answering a local canon in a building meant to represent the United States to that country.
Why it came down
The removal was not quiet. Ambassador Leah Campos framed it as a matter of what the embassy would and would not display, saying it was rejecting "globalist and woke ideologies" in favor of American patriotism. Erin Scavino, who now heads Art in Embassies, called the painting "aesthetically terrifying."
The State Department has also pointed to sexual assault accusations made against Wiley, which the artist has denied. Wiley, for his part, has suggested the real objection is a different picture altogether: his 2018 portrait of Barack Obama, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and remains the best-known American presidential portrait of the century so far.
What a sale would involve
Works acquired through Art in Embassies are federal property, and the department has indicated it is examining whether it can legally sell this one — not an obvious question, since the program's whole premise is that the collection is held for the public rather than traded.
Price is the other open item. Wiley's auction record is £660,400, about $845,000, set at Phillips in 2024 for a smaller work. Neither the artist's letter nor the department has named a figure.
The request puts the administration in an awkward position either way. Selling the painting concedes that a work the government commissioned, paid for and hung for a decade is now something it would rather not own. Keeping it means storing a canvas that two of its own officials have publicly described as offensive.
Reporting from Artnet News, ArtDependence and ARTnews.
