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" Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation. "
Kehinde Wiley
Also
Fashion
Nation
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" We all look at the same object in different ways. "
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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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" The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside. "
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Identity
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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 think it would be really interesting to paint Obama. "
Kehinde Wiley
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" Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture. "
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Culture
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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. "
Kehinde Wiley
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" What you have in my work is one person's path as he travels through the world, and there is no limitation of what is conceivable. "
Kehinde Wiley
Path
You
World
" 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
Me
Language
Child
" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "
Kehinde Wiley
Elite
Environment
Up
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Work
Control
Games
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Success
Childhood
Struggle
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Think
Evolution
Educated
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Way
See
Service
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Hip-Hop
Performance
Masculinity
" I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. "
Kehinde Wiley
I Am
Paint
Thinking
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
World
People
Thinking
" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "
Kehinde Wiley
Portraits
Individual
About
" Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement. "
Kehinde Wiley
Point
More
Painting
" I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me. "
Kehinde Wiley
Painting
Work
Day
" I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing! "
Kehinde Wiley
Food
Big
Restaurant
" What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body. "
Kehinde Wiley
American
Black
Body
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Slavery
Best
Gender
" Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society. "
Kehinde Wiley
Church
Been
Society
" 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. "
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Back
Look
Los Angeles
" Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence. "
Kehinde Wiley
Ability
Essence
Painting
" 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
Truth
Style
Painting
" Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form. "
Kehinde Wiley
Art
Image
Digital
" 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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Painting
Life
Long
" The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it. "
Kehinde Wiley
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