Kehinde Wiley Show at Nebraska Museum Postponed Amid Allegations of Sexual Assault

A Kehinde Wiley show due to open at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, this September has been quietly postponed as the artist faces allegations of sexual assault from multiple men.

In the past few weeks, Wiley, a painter widely known for creating Barack Obama’s official portrait, has faced accusations of rape. Those claims have been posted to Instagram by people such as artist Joseph Awuah-Darko and activist Derrick Ingram, who have said they plan to sue Wiley via class-action lawsuit in New York.

Wiley has denied these allegations, saying that he had encounters with Awuah-Darko and Ingram while also claiming that they were consensual. (The artist said he had never met a third accuser, Terrell Armistead.) Wiley called the allegations against him “baseless and defamatory.”

The Joslyn’s Wiley show was to feature a new series of portraits that a release from February described as being “specific to the diverse communities of Omaha.” The exhibition was slated to open in September, along with the rest of the museum, which has been closed since 2022 while the institution undergoes a renovation and expansion project.

On Wednesday, the Flatwater Free Press reported that the exhibition would no longer open this year, although it was not clear whether the allegations against Wiley had played a role in the postponement. A spokesperson for the museum told that publication, “We are revisiting our exhibition schedule.”

“We are working with The Joslyn Art Museum to find a new date that works with their revised exhibition schedule,” Georgia Harrell, a spokesperson for Kehinde Wiley, told ARTnews.

A representative for the Joslyn Art Museum did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

Another institutional Wiley show—subtitled “An Archaeology of Silence” and organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which debuted it in 2023—is slated to continue traveling the United States. According to Wiley’s website, the exhibition is still scheduled to come to the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Representatives for those museums did not respond to requests for comment.