Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement. "

" 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. "

" You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting. "

" The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside. "

" I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame. "

" 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. "

" Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic. "

" We all look at the same object in different ways. "

" 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. "

" I'm like a gypsy. I've got a place in Beijing, a place in New York, a place in west Africa; I'm working on a place in Colombia. I like the fact that painting is portable - and I've wanted my entire life to be able to see the world, to respond to it, and make that my life's work. "

" Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form. "

" I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work. "

" In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle. "

" I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture. "

" The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it. "

" Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies? "

" The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States - quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world - means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids but every population group in this nation. "

" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "

" If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down. "

" 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. "

" I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties. "

" Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation. "

" 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. "

Black And White