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Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.
Kehinde Wiley -
I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.
Kehinde Wiley
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My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you're looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken.
Kehinde Wiley -
I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.
Kehinde Wiley -
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.
Kehinde Wiley -
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.
Kehinde Wiley -
I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.
Kehinde Wiley -
It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley -
I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!
Kehinde Wiley -
Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.
Kehinde Wiley -
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.
Kehinde Wiley -
I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.
Kehinde Wiley -
What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
Kehinde Wiley
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Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.
Kehinde Wiley -
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.
Kehinde Wiley -
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.
Kehinde Wiley -
My love affair with painting is bittersweet.
Kehinde Wiley -
I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.
Kehinde Wiley -
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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley -
Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it.
Kehinde Wiley -
Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.
Kehinde Wiley -
When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.
Kehinde Wiley