You don't have to be from Israel to appreciate Kehinde Wiley's portraits of proud urban Arab and Jewish men, posed before stunningly intricate backdrops drawn from Jewish decorative art, on display in "The World Stage: Israel" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The African American artist - born in Los Angeles, educated as an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute and now based in New York City and Beijing - is neither Arab nor Jewish, but that outsider perspective has been critical to Wiley's practice.

"It has to do with access: What gives you the right to talk about certain subject matter as a young black American artist?" says Wiley from his New York studio, concerning his "World Stage" project, which has taken him to China, Brazil and Africa. "In many ways, I had to deal with that question very early on, in dealing with the Renaissance, the tradition of Western painting and portrait making. That was the tradition I was breast-fed upon - which comes out of a decadent tradition of painting within the context of the domination of black and brown peoples from around the world. It was one of the tools of subjugation, in many ways.

"What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe."

Israel's issues are, of course, far from black and white. In his 2011 "World Stage" series centered on the country, Wiley powerfully depicts a few of the shades, faces and ethnicities in between the binary distinctions, embodied in the men he discovered in the discos, malls and sporting spaces of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Lod. Among those striking figures are rapper and Israel Defense Forces veteran Kalkidan Mashasha, depicted in Ethiopia-emblazoned fatigues enmeshed in flowering tendrils and symbolism drawn from Eastern European mizrah plaques, and two men, Abed Al Ashe and Chaled El Awari, outfitted in T shirts and shorts, shaking hands and embraced by vines beneath the words "Can we all get along?"

"The World Stage" project began as part of Wiley's travels as an artist recognized for his portraits of African American men rendered in styles that riffed off the history of Western art.

"As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook," he says. "As an artist, I wanted to get down that experience of what was it like to be a young kid on streets of Tel Aviv or Sao Paulo or Beijing."

The process begins with him approaching men to participate in a portrait, which can be challenging in countries that are less culturally sophisticated than, for instance, Israel.

"In America , there's a just-add-water reality-TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame," says Wiley. "But in a lot of countries that I go to that are economically impoverished and arts consumption isn't normalized, you get people who are shocked and confused by this [art-making process]. In parts of the world, that level of attention is most consistent with the police or danger, so in those instances, you go out of the way to really plead your case that it's ultimately an enterprise that's about visual transformation."

Photographs and then studio work follow with Wiley focusing on the figure and other artists in his studios concentrating on the decorative fields.

"What you get isn't exactly what I found in the streets - parts are shot through Photoshop and are heightened or diminished," he says. "In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination."

If you go

The World Stage: Israel: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday-Tuesday, 1-8 p.m. Thursday. Through May 27. Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., S.F. $5-$12, 18 and under free. (415) 655-7800.

Kimberly Chun is a freelance writer. E-mail: Twitter: @kimberlychun