Sean Kelly Gallery
Artists, curatorial team, advisors, and partners connected to Sean Kelly Gallery.
Artists
Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles) is an American painter known for his reimagining of the traditions of portraiture and history painting, depicting Black subjects in the poses and settings of Old Master paintings. He earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Yale University. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; and The National Gallery, London. In 2018 his portrait of Barack Obama entered the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., making him the first African American artist to paint an official U.S. presidential portrait. In 2019 he founded Black Rock Senegal, an artist residency in Dakar. He lives and works in New York and Nigeria.
Luke Agada
Luke Agada (b. 1992, Lagos, Nigeria) is a painter whose work examines globalization, migration, and cultural dislocation. Central to his practice is the idea of a “third space,” a psychological and spatial condition arising from the intersection of memory, imagination, and observed reality, rendered in a palette dominated by umber tones. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023 and has exhibited at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, the Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and the African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos. He was an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA in 2023 and lives and works in Chicago.