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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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" When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy. "

" Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset. "

" My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north. "

" My love affair with painting is bittersweet. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society. "

" Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture. "

" Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock every day, is what gave me this sensibility and drove me to explore my fascination with art. "

" 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. "

" It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence. "

" 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. "

" I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe. "

" There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible. "

" So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement. "

" 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. "

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

" One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up. "