SAN FRANCISCO — Kehilde Wiley credited his mother, South Los Angeles, muralist Dewey Crumpler and Studio Museum of Harlem founder Thelma Golden as he opened Archeology of Silence at the DeYoung Museum March 18.

The $1 million exhibition features portraits and sculpture created in Senegal with a community of fellow artists during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

For Wiley, it was a homecoming for the San Francisco Art Institute graduate who grew up in South Los Angeles.

“I was the nude model more often than anyone else in art school because I needed the money,” he quipped.

Yet at age 12, his mother sent him to camp in St. Petersburg, Russia, making an investment in his creative future.   Wiley created his own gallery to sell his work to pay his way to college.

Crumpler, the 50-year veteran public artist, was a formative influence at San Francisco Art Institute and was nearby as Wiley gave an opening day conversation in the most coveted art spot in San Francisco decades later.

As a graduate student at Yale, Wiley was also tapped as a fellow at the Studio Museum of Harlem by Golden.

He is returning the favor by expanding the community of artists he created in Senegal to Nigeria, picking from 2,400 applicants to select more than dozen participants to explore creating art in West Africa.

For more details on the show, visit famsf.org