3. Go by Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley created a hand-painted glass triptych titled Go for the ceiling at the West 33rd Street entrance to Penn Station. The work, which was Wiley’s first permanent site-specific installation in glass, depicts Black New Yorkers who look as though they are breakdancing against a blue sky. Wiley also included a woman pointing her finger similar to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam at the Sistine Chapel. He drew from foreshortening techniques, which involve producing a dimensional illusion, to depict individuals wearing their regular streetwear with gravity-defying abilities.
Wiley wished to “play with the language of ceiling frescoes” because in ceiling frescoes, “people [express] a type of levity and religious devotion and ascendancy.” Wiley is best-known for works like Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, which is in the Brooklyn Museum, and the official portrait of President Barack Obama, from the National Portrait Gallery which was on view at the Brooklyn Museum last year.