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" What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body. "

Kehinde Wiley

American

Black

Body

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" Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value. "

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

" During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids. "

Kehinde Wiley

Good

Forest

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

Kehinde Wiley

Elite

Environment

" Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture. "

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

" 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. "

" Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with. "

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

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

" 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. "