In 1992, Mark Seliger shot a Rolling Stone cover of then-controversial rapper Ice-T wearing a police uniform and brandishing a nightstick. Time Warner, the parent company of Ice-T’s record label, had been made the subject of a shame campaign after an Ice-T side project called Body Count released an album featuring the song “Cop Killer.” By dressing the focal point of all this public outrage as a cop — holding a nightstick, less than a year after the country watched Rodney King get bludgeoned to a pulp by three uniformed Los Angeles policemen — Seliger caught the zeitgeist in a bottle.

Pretty great portrait. But I like Kehinde Wiley‘s painting of Ice-T, styled after Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres‘ 1806 “Portrait of Napoleon on His Imperial Throne,” almost as much. Now that Ice is 50 years old and