Kehinde Wiley Asks Trump to Let Him Buy Back Removed Embassy Painting

Kehinde Wiley has asked President Donald Trump to let him buy back his own painting after it was removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic.

Wiley sent the request by certified mail, according to an Oct. 1 report in Town & Country. In the letter, he said he was prepared to purchase the work to bring it home.

The painting is titled Young Artists After Siamesas 1960. It was commissioned in 2013 through Art in Embassies, the State Department program that places American art in U.S. diplomatic buildings around the world. Wiley spent two years studying Dominican painting before making it.

The finished work, dated to 2015, shows four local art students posed against a dense floral backdrop. Wiley built his reputation on portraits like these, placing Black subjects in the grand style once reserved for European royalty and aristocrats.

The embassy took the painting down in August. Ambassador Leah Campos carried out the removal with Erin Scavino, the head of the Art in Embassies program. In a video of the removal, Campos said the embassy was turning away from globalist and woke ideologies and embracing American patriotism.

Trump administration officials had mocked the work before it came down and later suggested auctioning it, The New York Times reported in September. Campos also described the painting in a radio interview as a huge painting of a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians.

Wiley told the Times he was confused by that description. The figures are art students, not a picnic scene as Campos framed it.

Many Americans know Wiley as the painter of Barack Obama’s official White House portrait for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. That 2018 portrait, with Obama seated amid green leaves, made him the first Black artist to paint a presidential portrait for that collection.

What makes this stand out is the directness of the ask. Embassy art is government property, and artists almost never write a president to reclaim it. Wiley is trying anyway.