Posing Dead to Make a Claim on Life in Paul Mendez and Kehinde Wiley

This paper intends to explore the convergence of queerness and blackness in Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk and black portraiture art, especially Kehinde Wiley’s portraits, with particular attention to his Christ-related works. With this purpose, I will review the narratives of postblackness and black camp (Pochmara and Wierzchowska 2017) characteristic of Bertram D. Ashe’s post-Soul aesthetics. Unlike the monolithic discourses of the Civil Rights generation, these artists cross over conceptions of race, sexuality and privilege in intersectional terms. They break with racial authenticity and play with appropriation, irony and camp to renegotiate and articulate othernesses and render them grievable.