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" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "
Kehinde Wiley
Traveled
Everywhere
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
World
People
Look
" 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
" I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "
Kehinde Wiley
Paint
Skin
People
" Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement. "
Kehinde Wiley
Point
More
Painting
" In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination. "
Kehinde Wiley
End
Destination
You
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Path
You
World
" What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body. "
Kehinde Wiley
American
Black
Body
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Painting
Surprise
New York
" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "
Kehinde Wiley
Portraits
Individual
About
" The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it. "
Kehinde Wiley
Work
Conversation
Power
" Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. "
Kehinde Wiley
Men
Live
About
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Success
Childhood
Struggle
" Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. "
Kehinde Wiley
Get
Once
Start
" In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame. "
Kehinde Wiley
World
America
Fame
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Men
Great
Portrait
" 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
Me
" 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
" 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
Interesting
Street
History
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Black
Work
Men
" I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do. "
Kehinde Wiley
People
Black
Looking
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
President
Ability
Better
" The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside. "
Kehinde Wiley
Identity
Performance
American
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
World
Best
Art
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
See
Truth
World
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Literature
Storytelling
Aesthetic
" The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset. "
Kehinde Wiley
About
Dignity
Portrait
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Truth
Style
Painting
" I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized. "
Kehinde Wiley
Value
Important
Finding
" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "
Kehinde Wiley
Elite
Environment
Up
" This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures. "
Kehinde Wiley
Hip-Hop
Performance
Masculinity