As many as 72,146 people have visited the museum over the past week.
Kehinde Wiley’s Barack Obama, 2018. Source: National Portrait Gallery/Artnet.com
Long queues to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington went out of the door due to the hype around two new portraits of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. The paintings by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald respectively have become a viral sensation since the last week’s unveiling.
Barack and Michelle Obama did what nobody has done before – they commissioned the portraits of the president and the first lady to African-American artists. The portraits are more contemporary than other traditional figurative paintings. Also, the recent attempts to accuse Kehinde Wiley of being racist in some of his previous works drew even more attention to the event.
A representative of the gallery told Artnet the museum’s website saw a huge uptick in traffic thanks to the increased number of visitors and the growing interest to the exhibition. The website has reached an average of 23,680 visits per day this February against 1,875 daily sessions in the past year.
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