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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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Me
Language
Child
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" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Work
Value
Said
" My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world. "
Kehinde Wiley
Much
World
Production
" My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys. "
Kehinde Wiley
Black And White
Women
Passion
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Think
Society
Own
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Matter
Up
Work
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
You
Cool
Like
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Learning
Growing Up
Going
" You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting. "
Kehinde Wiley
Tame
You
Painting
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
World
Life
Painting
" 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
Me
Good
Forest
" Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance. "
Kehinde Wiley
Thrive
Ideas
Finance
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Love
History
Myself
" The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time. "
Kehinde Wiley
Over
Heroic
Language
" 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
" I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama. "
Kehinde Wiley
Paint
Interesting
I Think
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Police
Black
Know
" 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
More
Moments
" Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement. "
Kehinde Wiley
Point
More
Painting
" 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
" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "
Kehinde Wiley
Elite
Environment
Up
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Slow
Beauty
You
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Imagination
Work
Play
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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