Shontay Haynes stands against an elaborately decorated background, embraced by flowers and vines. Kehinde Wiley’s paintings dip into the past to call attention to the erasure of people of color across art history; he inserts people of color into the grandest traditions of art history, from where they were once absent. Inverting tradition, Wiley invited Haynes—a stranger he met in St. Louis—to pose as the sixteenth-century Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman but encouraged her to dress, style, and stand however she wanted.