Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Powerful
Power
Black
" 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
" Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture. "
Kehinde Wiley
Culture
Black
American
" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "
Kehinde Wiley
Portraits
Individual
About
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Painting
Work
Day
" As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook. "
Kehinde Wiley
Culture
See
Street
" 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
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Choice
Own
Celebrate
" We all look at the same object in different ways. "
Kehinde Wiley
Look
Different
Ways
" I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture. "
Kehinde Wiley
Art
Looking
History
" 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
" At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings. "
Kehinde Wiley
Matter
Value
Deserve
" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "
Kehinde Wiley
Traveled
Everywhere
" Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence. "
Kehinde Wiley
Ability
Essence
Painting
" 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
" 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
" The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at. "
Kehinde Wiley
World
People
Thinking
" So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement. "
Kehinde Wiley
Much
History
Painting
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy. "
Kehinde Wiley
About
Favourite
Thought
" The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it. "
Kehinde Wiley
Work
Control
Games
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "
Kehinde Wiley
Elite
Environment
Up
" I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. "
Kehinde Wiley
I Am
Paint
Thinking