Former President Barack Obama commissioned a radical leftwing artist to create his “formal portrait” that will forever hang among presidential portraits in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Obama unveiled his formal portrait on Monday, and the public’s response has been harsh, to say the least.
Obama’s portrait — which appears to have been created in Photoshop — shows him sitting in a wooden chair while creeping ivy overlaps the chair and his legs.
Rather than commission an artist who could create a lasting legacy for a former president who changed the lives of millions of LGBT individuals, Obama chose Kehinde Wiley, a militant leftwing artist whose works include angry black women cutting off the heads of white women.
The current political climate that has polarized and divided a nation will not last into the next century. In forever linking himself to paintings of severed heads, Mr. Obama should have considered that people in 2118 won’t care that white women helped elect President Donald Trump in 2016.
In his attempt to send a message to Trump supporters right now, Obama neglected to think that people who walk the halls of the Smithsonian in 2118 will look upon his computerized graphic image, among the formal presidential paintings, and wonder what type of president would commission this sort of legacy for himself?
Whether you love him or hate him, Obama deserves a better legacy than this.
