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" 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. "

Kehinde Wiley

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

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

" 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 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. "

" Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies? "

" Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I'm like a gypsy. I've got a place in Beijing, a place in New York, a place in west Africa; I'm working on a place in Colombia. I like the fact that painting is portable - and I've wanted my entire life to be able to see the world, to respond to it, and make that my life's work. "

" The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking. "

" Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends. "

" 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. "

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

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

" In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Kehinde Wiley

Elite

Environment

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

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