Kehinde Wiley Quotes
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It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you're a kid.
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At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking.
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When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.
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If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw.
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I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!
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It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.
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In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be.
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By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
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I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.
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My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.
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I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.
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I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do.
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My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys.
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It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.
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Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.
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I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.
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I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.
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When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.
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Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.
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My love affair with painting is bittersweet.
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I've jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there's a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer - my version of him - that's in his collection.
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I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art.
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The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States - quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world - means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids but every population group in this nation.
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There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.