Kehinde Wiley Quotes
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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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I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.
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When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.
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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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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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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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I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.
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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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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 rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.
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This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.
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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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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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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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Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.
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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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If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way.
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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 need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!
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Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.
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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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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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I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.
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Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it.