Kehinde Wiley Wants to Buy Back His Own Painting After Trump Administration Deemed It Too ‘Woke’

The US artist Kehinde Wiley wants to buy back a painting from the Trump administration after it was removed from an embassy in the Dominican Republic for being too “woke”.

The large-scale painting, called Young Artists After Siamesas 1960 (2015), measures 3.66 metres wide and 2.75 metres tall (12 feet x 9 feet) and depicts four local art students adopting poses drawn from classic Dominican artworks by Celeste Woss y Gil and Gilberto Hernández Ortega. It is painted against a flat botanical background, a decorative hallmark of the artist who is best known for painting President Obama’s official portrait.  

Wiley created the painting for the US embassy in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, through the State Department’s Art in Embassies programme, which commissioned it in 2013. Officials removed it from the embassy in August, with the US ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Leah Campos, sharing a video on Instagram, writing by way of explanation that “we are turning away from globalist and woke ideologies and instead embracing American patriotism and the beauty of our great country”.

In a letter written by Wiley—addressed to President Trump, the director of Art in Embassies Erin Scavino, ambassador Campos and the secretary of state Marco Rubio—the artist states that he understands that the State Department is now considering whether the painting can be sold. 

“If your administration has determined that it no longer wishes to display the work, I would like to ask for the opportunity to purchase it back,” Wiley writes in the letter, a copy of which has been shared on Instagram by the artist’s New York City gallery, Sean Kelly. 

Describing how he worked for two years with local artists and embedded himself in Dominican art history to produce the work, Wiley explains that he had been responding to what he understood the Art in Embassies programme to be about: “The idea was a simple one: that an American embassy could be a place where people see something of themselves, and that art could create a connection between our country and theirs.”

The artist adds that while the administration may have come to a “different conclusion” about the work, “the painting remains important to me, as do the people and the ideas that it represents”. 

Art in Embassies did not immediately respond to the idea of considering an offer from Wiley.

A spokesperson for Sean Kelly Gallery has not yet responded to an inquiry about whether the buy-back offer would represent a return of Wiley’s commission fee, or fair market value for the painting in 2026.

The artist’s auction record is £660,400, achieved for his large-scale 2008 painting Christian Martyr Tarcisius at Phillips in spring 2024. Smaller than the Dominican painting, it was then the largest Wiley painting to be offered on the secondary market and the highest price achieved for his work at auction since 2021. Sean Kelly is opening a solo show in New York City with the artist on 6 November.