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" 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

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" Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world. "

" If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world. "

" 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. "

" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "

" I've jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there's a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer - my version of him - that's in his collection. "

" 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. "

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

Kehinde Wiley

Traveled

Everywhere

" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "

Kehinde Wiley

Elite

Environment

" 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. "

" My love affair with painting is bittersweet. "

" 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. "

" Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it. "

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

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

" 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. "

" So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement. "

" 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. "

" I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties. "