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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Kehinde Wiley

Opportunity

Art

Black

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Kehinde Wiley

Amazing

Library

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be. "

" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

Kehinde Wiley

Sit

Little

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world. "

" I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. "

" For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing. "

" Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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