Gallery label
A powerful Black woman in Givenchy holds the severed head of a White woman, forcing race, gender, beauty, and museum power into the old script.
Look closely
The NCMA records the work's ten-foot height, Brooklyn street-cast model, floral pattern, and deliberate substitution of a White woman's head for Holofernes. Wiley based the pose on Giovanni Baglione's seventeenth-century Judith with the Head of Holofernes.
Why this Judith matters
The NCMA’s creation history locates the work in Brooklyn. That makes the painting strong evidence for a twenty-first-century American Judith tradition while keeping creation history distinct from later ownership provenance.
Sources for this record:North Carolina Museum of Art record ↗NCMA source-painting and model notes ↗Eugenie Tsai, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic ↗
“A powerful Black woman in Givenchy holds the severed head of a White woman, forcing race, gender, beauty, and museum power into the old script.”
Narrative index
Primary catalogue placement: display of the head, Judith 13:14–16. The index organizes comparison; it does not claim that every visual detail comes from those verses or that the work touches only one episode.
