Sean Kelly and Kehinde Wiley. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

You’re probably stacking the deck a bit when you ask a bunch of tipsy people a rhetorical question, but nevertheless let’s hand the microphone to dealer Sean Kelly for a moment. “Stop the dancing, stop the party, just for a few minutes, I promise.” That’s what they all say!

This was at 10:30 on Saturday night, at the after-party for Kehinde Wiley, at the Bowery Hotel. Earlier that evening, Mr. Kelly could have been spotted attempting, with limited success, to navigate the throngs at his gallery. There’d been hundreds of people lined up outside before Mr. Wiley’s opening even started, he gasped, following that up with: “Touré is here, Kanye is expected.” Gayle King, Bill T. Jones, Terence Koh and Jeffrey Deitch showed up.

Later, at the Bowery, when Mr. Kelly stopped the music, people were imbibing copious quantities of gratis Remy Martin (the sponsor); some were playing pool. Leaning over a couch, Guyanese-American actress Carol Christine Hilaria Pounder, known as C.C.H. Pounder, who is married to Senegalese anthropologist Boubacar Kone, founder of the Boribana Museum in Dakar, Senegal, was providing Gallerist with the requisite Wiley I-knew-him-when: “Fifteen years ago, he came to my house. He said he would paint something for me over the summer. I went to Africa, and when I came back he’d painted a beautiful triptych … I met a struggling artist who was on his way.” But back to Mr. Kelly, and his rhetorical question. “So, do you think the Irish can throw a party?” Yes, Mr. Kelly, yes, they can. With that, he told everyone that Mr. Wiley’s show was completely sold out, and then the music came on again.

sdouglas@observer.com

And this painting to the left is one of them! Details follow:

Kancou Diaovno
30" x 24"
oil on canvas
2012
Copyright Kehinde Wiley
Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

See more at the opening at Sean Kelly tomorrow night, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Mr. Wiley. (Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery)

Artist Kehinde Wiley will have his first solo show with Sean Kelly Gallery on May 5. For the occasion, he is presenting, for the first time, a series of portraits that focus on women as his subjects.

Here's some info according to a press release:

Instead of representing the models in their own clothes, as is the case with his portraits of men, Wiley has collaborated with Riccardo Tisci, Creative Director of the famed French couture house Givenchy, to design long dresses for the women. As creative collaborators, Wiley and Tisci spent numerous hours together walking through the galleries of the Louvre and discussing both the aesthetic and conceptual context for the project, specifically society’s ideals of feminine beauty and the frequent marginalization of women of color. Following these conversations, Tisci designed six unique dresses for the models.

The show is called "An Economy of Grace." In a statement, Mr. Wiley said, "This series of works attempts to reconcile the presence of black female stereotypes that surrounds their presence and/or absence in art history, and the notions of beauty, spectacle, and the ‘grand’ in painting.”

He has based the poses of his subjects on portraits of society women by Jacques-Louis David, Thomas Gainsborough and John Singer Sargent and others.

Another woman Mr. Wiley has painted recently is the musician Santigold. His portrait of her appears on the cover of her new album, The Master of My Make-Believe, out May 1.

"Alios Itzhak," 2011. (Courtesy The Jewish Museum)

The Jewish Museum announced today that its Kehinde Wiley exhibition, "World Stage: Israel," which is set to open on March 9, will include a special painted "wallscape" in downtown Manhattan, on either Houston or Canal Street, though the exact location is yet to be decided. The outdoor piece represents a new direction for the Upper East Side institution, museum representative Anne Scher said today, and "a very different way of promoting an exhibition."

"The Jewish Museum is trying something it has not done before," said Ms. Scher. The museum's advertising agency, Our Man In Havana, is overseeing the creation of the wallscape--an oversize reproduction of the Kehinde Wiley painting Alios Itzhak, which was acquired by the museum, and which will be painted by a number of assistants.

Mr. Wiley is no stranger to lower Manhattan, having long shown at Deitch Projects until its namesake dealer left town to become director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The artist recently signed with Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea.

The exhibition, the latest installment in Mr. Wiley’s celebrated "World Stage" series, will feature 14 large-scale portraits of Israeli youth--he scouted for models in discos, malls and sports bars in 2010 in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem—against a background of Jewish ceremonial art.

Though Mr. Wiley is not Jewish—his father is Yoruba, and his mother is African-American—the show, in its exploration of Jewish culture, embodies the museum's mission to foster "the enjoyment, understanding, and preservation of the artistic and cultural heritage of the Jewish people."

In connection with the show, there will be a series of related programming, including a conversation between the artist and pop culture critic and Today Show contributor Lola Ogunnaike, as well as a series of after-hours musical events called the Wind Up, featuring Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop artist Kalkidan Mashasha and multimedia artist Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky.