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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "

" I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw. "

Kehinde Wiley

Sit

Little

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing! "

" Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside. "

" 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. "

" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "

Kehinde Wiley

Traveled

Everywhere

" 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. "

" 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

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

" When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "