On brand.

You probably don’t recognize the name Kehinde Wiley, but you might recognize his ridiculous official portrait of Obama in which one of the worst men to ever squat in the White House appears to be sitting in a chair inside a bush or some hedgerows.

Widely praised by the TED Talk people and mocked by everyone else (at least until King Charlie’s portrait came along), there didn’t seem to be much of a case to be made for it except that the Obamas were determined to make history by picking black artists and they couldn’t find any so they had to settle for these junior high school art projects that smell like paste when you look at them.

Anyway, to make a long story short, you might recognize Wiley’s name after this.

In an Instagram post shared Sunday, British-Ghanaian artist and curator Joseph Awuah-Darko alleged Wiley sexually assaulted him twice in 2021. Awuah-Darko said the first incident occurred on June 9, 2021, at a dinner held at the Noldor Artist Residency in Ghana, to celebrate Wiley’s work. Awuah-Darko is the founder and chairman of the Accra-based program.

In the post, he claimed he was “inappropriately groped” by Wiley, in front of another guest, and that the action was “unwelcome and unprovoked.” He then described a second incident that day as “much more severe and violent,” without elaborating further. (In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, he claimed that “a sexual encounter began consensually, but that it then moved to a bedroom, where… Mr. Wiley forced himself on him after Mr. Awuah-Darko had said he did not want to go further.”)

The assaults “almost destroyed me,” Awuah-Darko wrote in the post, adding he hoped that others would feel empowered to come forward.

Wiley is denying the accusations, and this is as much as I want to know about the whole thing except that having another Obama grandiose woke gesture boil down to this is perfectly on brand.

The right side of history is so wrong.