Kehinde Wiley Quotes
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One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.
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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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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.
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I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.
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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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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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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'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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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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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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I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!
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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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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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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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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'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 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 has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.
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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 think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.
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There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.
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My love affair with painting is bittersweet.
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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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Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.