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" Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography. "

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" 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

" We all look at the same object in different ways. "

" 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. "

" The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset. "

" 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. "

" Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. "

" It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence. "

" What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture. "

" 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. "

" Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance. "

" My love affair with painting is bittersweet. "

" 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

Language

Child

" My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north. "

" It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer. "

" Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic. "

" The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time. "

" 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. "

" 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

Moments

" 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. "

" Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with. "

" Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation. "

" 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. "

" 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

Good

Forest

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible. "

" You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers. "