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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" There's something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That's the magic of painting. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "