Kehinde Wiley puts a fresh and much-needed spin on the same old, boring, Western art history that you probably learned in college.

By now, it’s no secret that the art historical canon is #problematic. The absence of people of color – especially black artists – from galleries and museums is as apparent as ever. Thankfully, we have contemporary artists like Betye Saar, El Anatsui, David Hammons, and Kehinde Wiley, among many others, who continue to make great art despite these odds. Black artists are getting more attention than ever before; more museums are collecting works by black artists and mounting more shows devoted to them. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, but Kehinde Wiley is one of the many artists whose work exalts the black figure to combat the oppressive nature of art history.

As a graduate student at the Yale School of Art, Wiley got tired of the neo-minimalist BS that obsessed his classmates. Instead, he decided to focus on the challenges that young, urban black men and women experience. This work is part of the larger Rumors of War series, which Wiley based on the legacy of equestrian portraiture in Western art. This genre is pretty niche, but it must be fun to work with because it is especially loaded with ideological meaning. In this particular instance, Wiley replaces the Napoleonic soldier in Theodore Géricault’s Officer of the Hussars with a tatted-up dude wearing jeans and a pair of Timberlands – basically the standard New York City uniform.

This painting perfectly portrays the New York attitude because the model, as in all of Wiley’s portraits, is someone he really met on the street. For this and the other works in this series, Wiley painted people he met on 125th Street in Harlem, where a gigantic H&M now stands depressingly close to the famous Apollo Theater, which would probably make Harlem Renaissance artists like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden roll over in their graves. All of Wiley’s works use everyday people but directly quote “famous” paintings; to add an additional layer of metaphysicality, his sitters always choose which works they want their portraits to emulate. Like a modern-day Valázquez depicting Juan de Pareja, Wiley channels how these people perceive and perform their own identities, and his efforts have produced stunning results in both oil paint and stained glass.

Having just mounted a huge show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015, Wiley has definitely officially “made it.” Not to mention, he also received a U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts from John Kerry in 2015. In popular culture, his paintings, including this one, frequently appear in the TV show Empire, which centers on the fabulous life – and apparently even more fabulous art collection – of a New York family of hip-hop performers and moguls. It turns out that the Lyon family owns a lot of famous art that somehow made its way from various museums right into their ballin’ Manhattan apartment. Their collection includes four other works by Wiley; works by artists like Seurat , Basquiat, and Monet; and even van Gogh’s Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette. Pretty sweet collection, if you ask me.