- Interesting
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- Nov 07, 2020
Kehinde Wiley Quotes
Most Famous Kehinde Wiley Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Field
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Chaos
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Belief
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- About
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- Nov 07, 2020
Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
I've fished everywhere I've traveled.
- Art
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Art
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Men
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- Nov 07, 2020
Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.
- Early Work
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Black
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- Nov 07, 2020
The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.
- Best
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Look
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Always
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Bittersweet
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- Nov 07, 2020
My love affair with painting is bittersweet.
- Man
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- He
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- Nov 07, 2020
Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic.
- Look
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- Nov 07, 2020
We all look at the same object in different ways.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.
- Practice
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.
- Imagination
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- Nov 07, 2020
The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Paint
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- Nov 07, 2020
I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Man
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- Nov 07, 2020
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 Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.
- Art World
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Exceedingly
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Better
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Childhood
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Biotechnology
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- Nov 07, 2020
Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.
- Cool
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Painting
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Black
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Legacy
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nation
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- Nov 07, 2020
Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.
- Portrait
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- Nov 07, 2020
The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.
- Painting
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- Nov 07, 2020
You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.
- Church
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- Nov 07, 2020
Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.
- Body
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- Nov 07, 2020
What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Feeling
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Best
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Learning
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Painting
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- Nov 07, 2020
Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.
- Environment
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- Nov 07, 2020
I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.
- Light
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Beauty
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Cool
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- Nov 07, 2020
I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.
- Broader
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- Nov 07, 2020