Acclaimed painter Kehinde Wiley, whose buyers include Denzel Washington and Sir Elton John, is famed for his portraits of urban black men in classic Renaissance scenes. In an interview he said that he was recently approached by Michael Jackson and initially thought it was a hoax:

“Michael Jackson is calling me. We’re discussing exactly what it will involve. He saw my work at the Brooklyn Museum and was taken with it, so he had his people contact me.

I thought it was a joke at first, so I ignored it for the longest time. Then he contacted a friend of mine who’s an actor, so I knew it was for real.”

Kehinde Wiley is a New York based painter from Los Angeles who has situated himself firmly within art history’s tradition of portrait painting. He appropriates the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, opulent, majestic, and sublime in his representations of young, urban, black men. His portraits are based on photographs of young men who Wiley sees on the street. Dressed in street clothes, they are asked to assume poses from the paintings of Renaissance masters, such as Titian and Tiepolo.

Source: WENN, MJFC-USA