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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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Way
See
Service
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" 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. "
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" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "
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" I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "
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" 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. "
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" By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope. "
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" Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible. "
Kehinde Wiley
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" My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint. "
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" I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing! "
Kehinde Wiley
Food
Big
Restaurant
" One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up. "
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Never
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Me
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
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You
" I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama. "
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I Think
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
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" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
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" Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends. "
Kehinde Wiley
Friends
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" 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. "
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Language
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" The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it. "
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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. "
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" My love affair with painting is bittersweet. "
Kehinde Wiley
Affair
Bittersweet
Painting
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
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Place
" 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. "
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" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Doing
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" 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. "
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" My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world. "
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" Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence. "
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Ability
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Painting
" 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
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" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
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High