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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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Matter
Value
Deserve
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" My love affair with painting is bittersweet. "
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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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" You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative. "
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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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" If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world. "
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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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" Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation. "
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" Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends. "
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Friends
Know
Light
" 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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Learning
Growing Up
Going
" My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north. "
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Work
Time
" 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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Work
Control
Games
" 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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Never
Knowing
Me
" 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
People
Black
Looking
" 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
" I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department. "
Kehinde Wiley
Police
Black
Know
" In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame. "
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World
America
Fame
" My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world. "
Kehinde Wiley
Much
World
Production
" Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible. "
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Push
Beyond
Nation
" 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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About
Favourite
Thought
" My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria. "
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Go
Family
Texas
" 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
Black
American
" I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing! "
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Food
Big
Restaurant
" The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you. "
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Slow
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" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "
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Traveled
Everywhere
" I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties. "
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Chef
Day
Thought
" 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
" When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers. "
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Best
Myself
Place
" When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry. "
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Amazing
Library
Me
" 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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Men
Great
Portrait
" Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society. "
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Church
Been
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