Kehinde Wiley Quotes
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Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it.
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My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked.
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My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic.
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I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated - I'm not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization - what I'm trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don't really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily.
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You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.
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What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture.
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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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There's something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That's the magic of painting.
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My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.
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The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at.
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At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings.
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I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.
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I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.
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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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Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies?
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My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.
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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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It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.
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In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.
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The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it.
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In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination.
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I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there.
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Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.
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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.