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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Kehinde Wiley

Family

Texas

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic. "

" If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at. "

" 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. "

" During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids. "

Kehinde Wiley

Good

Forest

" I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial. "

" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "

Kehinde Wiley

Traveled

Everywhere

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

" Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

Kehinde Wiley

Rules

Moments

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "