Kehinde Wiley's breakthrough came when he was working at Harlem's Studio Museum, painting portraits of local people he had met on the street. During the process, his subjects leafed through his collection of art books, remarking on the paintings they liked. So Wiley offered to paint them that way. The South Central-born, Yale-educated artist took ordinary African-Americans and filtered them through the grand style of Western art, giving a homeless man all the heroic pomp that Diego Velasquez would bring to a portrait of a 17th century Pope.

Now the 28-year-old Wiley is working with a whole new canvas: the artists celebrated by the 2005 edition VH1's Hip-Hop Honors. How does he handle bringing a bit of Napoleon to a celebrity such as Ice T? "Looking through art history books you gain an understanding of how the vocabulary of power can evolve," he says. "So what we have here is all those tricks laid bare and compounded with the presence of hip-hop." Wiley has given our honorees the truly regal resonance their innovations deserve.