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*Oscar winner Viola Davis has been dubbed “the black Meryl Streep,” but when it comes to substantial job opportunities and equal pay in Hollywood, Davis says that’s where the comparisons stop, The Root reports.
Speaking at the Women in the World Los Angeles Salon in Hollywood on Tuesday, Davis told Tina Brown: “People say, ‘You’re a black Meryl Streep … we love you. There is no one like you.’ OK, then if there is no one like me, you think I’m that, you pay me what I’m worth,” she said.
“We get probably a 10th of what a Caucasian woman gets,” she continued. “I’m No. 1 on the call sheet, and then I have to go in and I have to hustle for my worth. That’s what I feel like I am doing, and I have more than a 30-year professional career.”
Davis added: “I have a career that’s probably comparable to Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Sigourney Weaver. They all came out of Yale. They came out of Juilliard. They came out of [New York University]. They had the same path as me, and yet I am nowhere near them. Not as far as money. Not as far as job opportunities. Nowhere close to it.”
Davis said she’s sick of getting offered things like “the third girl from the left,” and not the big roles she is looking for. She said she’s no longer going to hustle to prove herself.
“I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not hustling for my worth. I’m worthy. When I came out of my mother’s womb, I came out worthy.”
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Sources say artist Kehinde Wiley — who painted the former president Barack Obama before a background of greenery and flowers — has studios in China where he produces most of his work.
Now many are wondering if the presidential portrait of Obama made in China.
“It’s his base of operation,” said art critic Charlie Finch, who has known Wiley and appreciated his talent since they were students at Yale. “He has dozens of assistants working for him.”
While Obama sat for Wiley for several hours, the portrait may have been sent to China to be completed, per Page Six.
“Normally, Wiley sketches out the important parts, and assistants fill out the rest,” Finch told me.
Wiley often paints his subjects in front of flamboyantly colorful backgrounds but both conservatives and liberals have been critical of his Obama portrait, with many believing that it’s not aesthetically consistent with prior presidential portraits.
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