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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Kehinde Wiley

Think

Society

Own

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized. "

" My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint. "

Kehinde Wiley

Matter

Work

" My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria. "

Kehinde Wiley

Family

Texas

" I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work. "

" 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

" 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. "

" Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement. "

Kehinde Wiley

Point

Painting

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

" 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. "

" One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up. "

Kehinde Wiley

Never

Knowing

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

" I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "

" I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. "

" Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible. "

" I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department. "

" I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial. "