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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
Push
Beyond
Nation
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" 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
" 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 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
" 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
Back
Look
Los Angeles
" I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work. "
Kehinde Wiley
People
Meet
Who
" I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial. "
Kehinde Wiley
Practice
Think
Artist
" I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "
Kehinde Wiley
Paint
Skin
People
" There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards. "
Kehinde Wiley
Slavery
Best
Gender
" 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 way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset. "
Kehinde Wiley
About
Dignity
Portrait
" It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence. "
Kehinde Wiley
Just
See
Easy
" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "
Kehinde Wiley
Elite
Environment
Up
" 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
" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "
Kehinde Wiley
Portraits
Individual
About
" 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
" 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
" I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties. "
Kehinde Wiley
Chef
Day
Thought
" 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
" You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative. "
Kehinde Wiley
Colour
People
You
" Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope. "
Kehinde Wiley
Hope
Changing
Art
" I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art. "
Kehinde Wiley
Think
Evolution
Educated
" 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 whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it. "
Kehinde Wiley
Work
Conversation
Power
" 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
Know
Light
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time. "
Kehinde Wiley
Over
Heroic
Language
" 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