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" So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement. "
Kehinde Wiley
Much
History
Painting
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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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" 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
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Best
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" My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked. "
Kehinde Wiley
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" I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. "
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Thinking
" You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting. "
Kehinde Wiley
Tame
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" 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
" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "
Kehinde Wiley
Portraits
Individual
About
" In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination. "
Kehinde Wiley
End
Destination
You
" 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
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Off
Creepy
Face
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. "
Kehinde Wiley
Get
Once
Start
" The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that. "
Kehinde Wiley
President
Ability
Better
" 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
" 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 performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside. "
Kehinde Wiley
Identity
Performance
American
" 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
" 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'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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Interesting
Street
History
" 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 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
" Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies? "
Kehinde Wiley
Stop
Black
Europe
" 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
" 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. "
Kehinde Wiley
Painting
Surprise
New York
" 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