of Art in 2001. While at art school, he says that the most important lesson he learned was to create art that he wanted to make, not art that his professors wanted him to make. [1] Before becoming an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem,[16] which Wiley has later stated: "made [him] the artist [he] is today."[17]Jeffrey Deitch, an art dealer, and curator, gave Wiley his first solo show – Passing/Posing – at the Hoffman Gallery in Chicago in 2005. Deitch represented him for the next 10 years.[18] Wiley has cited the artist Kerry James Marshall as being a big influence on him. Career Residency and inspiration The beginnings of Wiley's now-famous portraits can be traced back to his time in Harlem, New York, during his residency at the Studio Museum. It was at this time he came upon a crumpled mugshot released by the New York Police Department. On it was a photo of an African American man in his twenties with his basic personal information in order for the man to be identified. Wiley held onto this mugshot that would inspire some of his future work, such as Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence), as well as a recreation of this mugshot in Mugshot Study (2006, Plate 8).When later commenting on his fascination with the mugshot and its influence in his art, Wiley noted that when he found it on the street, it altered his view of what portraiture could be as well as solidified his feelings about the portrayal of black men in the world. Wiley saw that there was something lacking. He then turned to his background in classical paintings and began to compare this new type of portraiture to the ones he studied from the eighteenth century. This would spark inspiration in Wiley and lead to him creating a combination of his new modern portraiture and the classic ones from history. The world stage Although Wiley's portraits were initially based on photographs of young men from the streets of Harlem, Wiley began to expand to an international view, including models found in urban backdrops from around the world – including Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro. This immense body of work became known as, "The World Stage." Models are dressed in their everyday clothing and asked to assume poses found in artwork from their location's history. It's a juxtaposition of "the 'old' inherited by