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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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" 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

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

" 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 sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "

" At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking. "

" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "

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

Kehinde Wiley

Point

Painting

" 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

Language

Child

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that. "

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

" 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. "