#loby

Hank Willis Thomas is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist who focuses on themes of identity, the media, and popular culture. Thomas’s site-specific neon sculpture Love Rules, here in the main lobby, welcomes visitors to the Museum. The artist explains the work’s personal meaning: "I grew up in a family where love overruled. My cousin, Songha Willis, was murdered in Philadelphia in 2000. A month after he died, I found a recording of the incident, and his last words were “love over rules.”⠀⠀

NOW ON VIEW in our Lobby: Kehinde Wiley

After touring six cities for more than two years, Kehinde Wiley’s monumental, nine-foot portrait is back in Brooklyn! Now on view in our Rubin Lobby, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) transforms the traditional equestrian portrait by substituting an anonymous young Black man dressed in contemporary clothing for the figure of Napoleon, to present a new kind of portraiture that redefines and affirms Black identity and simultaneously questions the history of Western painting. Wiley has stated that “Painting is about the world we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. This is my way of saying yes to us.”