Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset. "
Kehinde Wiley
About
Dignity
Portrait
" 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
" Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement. "
Kehinde Wiley
Point
More
Painting
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Time
Work
Early
" 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
People
Hell
You
" It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer. "
Kehinde Wiley
Black
Cares
Age
" In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be. "
Kehinde Wiley
World
Matter
Our
" I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. "
Kehinde Wiley
I Am
Paint
Thinking
" The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time. "
Kehinde Wiley
Over
Heroic
Language
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Flower
Image
Belief
" So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement. "
Kehinde Wiley
Much
History
Painting
" 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
Push
Beyond
Nation
" 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
Go
Family
Texas
" 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 taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "
Kehinde Wiley
Paint
Skin
People
" 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
" 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
Artist
Looking
" 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
" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "
Kehinde Wiley
Traveled
Everywhere
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form. "
Kehinde Wiley
Art
Image
Digital
" My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north. "
Kehinde Wiley
True
Work
Time
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Remember
Time
Painting
" 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
" 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
" It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence. "
Kehinde Wiley
Just
See
Easy
" 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