Kehinde Wiley famous quotes

What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or allows to consider the world in a slightly different way.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Light #World

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

#Thinking #Important #Grain

I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Artist #Thinking #Answers

There is a political and racial context behind everything that I do. Not always because I design it that way, or because I want it that way, but rather because it's just the way people look at the work of an African-American artist in this country.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Country #Artist #People

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Understanding #Looks #Want

All art is self-portraiture.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Self #Portraiture

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Fighting #Keys #Design

I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Believe #Artist #Culture

Women are expected to identify gender as a starting point. Ethnicities are expected to identify that as a location. Is it ever possible for the artist to imagine a state of absolute freedom? That was my call to arms.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Artist #Ethnicity #Arms

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Believe #Artist #Thinking

When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Narrative #Analyzing #Becoming

I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Mean #Trying #World

This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new. This desire to throw away the old rules.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Father #Artist #Past

If I have the same plan to go into the streets, find random strangers, use art-historical referent from their - from the specific location, to use decorative patterns from this location, that's a rule. That's a set of patterns that you can apply to all societies. But what gives rise or what comes out of each experiment is so radically different.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Giving #Historical

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Race #Class #Painting

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Dna #Needs

I think that I'm increasingly aware of the fact that in order to work towards any statement that's radically global or universal, you have to start in a place that's radically intimate and particular.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Order #Facts

That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Girl #Art #Museums

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Games #Historical #Portraiture

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Eye #Beholder

Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Past #Play #Doe

So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Differences #Careers #Wife

I feel sometimes constrained by the expectation that the work should be solely political. I try to create a type of work that is at the service of my own set of criteria, which have to do with beauty and a type of utopia that in some ways speaks to the culture I'm located in.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Expectations #Political #Trying

Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Powerful #Past #Class

There's quite obviously the desire to open the rule sets that allow for inclusion or disclusion. I think that my hope would be that my work set up certain type of precedent, that allowed for great institutions, museums and viewers to see the possibilities of painting culture to be a bit more inclusive.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Museums #Desire

I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Self Confidence #Thinking #People

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Book #Mean

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.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Thinking #Talking

What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety. So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Perfection #Anxiety

Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Struggle #Embodiment #Might

I'd like to walk that fine line between the authentic artist self and the manufactured artist self. I'd like to exist outside of a set of expectations or assumptions about what the Kehinde Wiley brand is. And I'd like to walk towards something that's a bit more unpredictable, human.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Artist #Self #Expectations

How does the artist function as poet-slash-witness-slash-trickster?
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Artist #Doe #Poet

What's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice, painting simply sits there silently and begs you to notice the smallest of detail.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Moving #Choices #Details

On the contrary, my desire is that the viewer sees the background coming forward in the lower portion of the canvas, fighting for space, demanding presence.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Fighting #Space #Desire

I happen to be a twin. I grew up half of my life with someone who looks and sounds like me. And I believe it's possible to hold twin desires in your head, such as the desire to create painting and destroy painting at once. The desire to look at a black American culture as underserved, in need of representation, a desire to mine that said culture and to lay its parts bare and look at it almost clinically.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Believe #Black #Desire

There were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Artist #Expectations #Black

I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem [New York, NY]. I wanted to know what that was about. I would actually pull people from off of the streets and ask them to come to my studio.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#New York #Artist #Museums

I try to create a place of disorientation.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Trying #Disorientation

I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Strong #Ideas #Essentials

I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Beautiful #Art #Block

I think that at its best you just have to respect each arena for what they can do well.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Arena #Wells

I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#People #Culture #Idiot

I had no idea about where I was going. I had no sense of art as anything other than a problem to be fixed, you know, an itch to be scratched. I was in that studio trying my best to feel content with myself. I had, like, a stipend. I had a place to sleep. I had a studio to work in. I had nothing else to think about, you know. And that's - that was a huge luxury in New York City.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #New York #Sleep

All the world's a stage. P.T. Barnum: It becomes a circus. But circuses or street pageants or parades have always been useful in a society.They've always been useful as a way of critiquing power. The carnivalesque has always been useful as a way of the powerful being mocked in a public space.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Powerful #Space #Circus

That's the trouble with, I think, my - the contemporary read of my work. So many people just simply say, "These are pretty pictures of black boys." They're not really thinking about, like, what the whole thing is.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Boys #People

I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black America as something that not only can be mined in a very sort of cynical, cold way, but also embraced in a very personal, love-driven way; but also sort of critiqued.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Creating #America

In America, there's this type of expectation of just-add-water celebrity, this type of, "Of course you found me; we're all going to be famous for 15 minutes," sort of Paris-Hilton-ization of society.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#America #Paris #Water

Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Looks #Portraiture

What we have now is a communication ability. We have the ability to see working ideas that are going on in the great cities throughout the world and whether you live in Shanghai or you live in Sao Paulo, you have the ability of seeing and knowing the ideas of some of the greatest minds of our generation.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Communication #Cities #Ideas

I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Mother #Art #Russia

There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Vocabulary #Stories #Said

Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Artist #Talking #Ideas

My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Flower #Assistants #Figures

I think it's really useful to create parameters. The term you use can be forwarded into something more like a grid, a rubric, a system that you apply to all environments, and in so doing you create a situation in which you can locate local color, local differences within new environments.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Color #Differences

I suppose in the end what shift occurred - is that at Yale I began to become more materially and conceptually aware of the mechanisms that gave rise to those types of patterns and paintings. And so the copying that happened in the childhood was a much more conscious type of copying in later years.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Yale #Years #Childhood

I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Mother #Art #Educational

If I were making paintings of a bowl of fruit it would still be viewed through some sort of political lens, because the viewer wants to create a type of narrative around the political theme when they look at work depicting black and brown models.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Political #Black #Want

Most people say, "Hell, no. I don't know who you are. This scares me. Like, I'm not interested in this."Another way of looking at these paintings is, these are the guys who said yes.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#People #Guy #Scare

Mel [ Bochner] held large-form meetings with students. But the stronger points came through when we had the one-on-one critiques. And that's the system that works at Yale. There's the group critiques, and then there's the one-on-one critiques that happen in studio.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Yale #Stronger #Groups

Joseph Gotto, yeah. Just all-around one of the more inspiring artists - not because of any sort of specific content direction, but rather the respect that I had for his own work and the ability for him to translate his ideas into useful form for me as a student.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Artist #Ideas #Students

One of my most strong memories was studying with Mel Bochner, one of the, I think, high water marks of American conceptual art.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Strong #Memories

Going back to that idea that painting sits still and that we give ourselves over to it over time. There's a difference between living with - imagine if this were sitting in your living room for 15 years. You'd probably understand the contours of it.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Differences #Years #Ideas

I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Painting #Problem #Western

I noticed that the work of my non - I noticed that the work of my friends who were white and male, specifically, existed in a type of freedom that was not bound by certain political questions and assumptions and locations.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#White #Political #Males

I love the of dealing with the homoerotic versus the idea of dealing with certain tropes with regards to black masculinity in the world, propensity towards sports, antisocial behavior, hypersexuality - all of these sort of non-truths that I don't exist in but that I see as being fixed in the world's imagination.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Sports #Ideas #Imagination

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Running #Art #School

I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Multitasking #Certain #Concern

Can I - do I have to be obsessed with it and proceed from that? Not always. But when I'm on top of my game, I definitely think about the way that the world sees me and the way that the world thinks about painting. You must.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Games #World

It was probably one of the things that gave me a sense of possibility and allowed for me to see beyond the small community that I existed within. You know, I was making friends with young Soviet kids. this is during perestroika. You know, there's bread lines and vodka lines. The entire social structure of what was then the Soviet Union was radically different from what we know today.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Kids #Community #Unions

I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's in these streets that day?
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Mean #Facts #Stranger

I have been painting models with black and brown skin only for the past years. So, I did already have this experience, this is how I have come to the paintings I do now.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Past #Years #Black

I think what we should concentrate on is what it feels like to be a working artist in the day to day. One doesn't imagine what comes down the line.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Artist #Lines

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Real #Book #Mean

He's a great - he's a great professor. He retired recently, but.But Peter Halley as well.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Peter #Professors #Wells

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Car #People #Los Angeles

I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Garden #Thinking #World

I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Brother #Art #Kids

I think that once you're able to sort of get in line with who and how you relate to the world, you'll become closer to this index that I'm referring to. Because what you want is this card that relates to that book. What you want is this human that relates to this world, rather than having this art school society scattering that point of view somewhere in between. It becomes diffused. And that level of clarity, I think, was gained at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Book #School

It was something that came sort of matter-of-factually. Because there - it's like really - real honest engagement with the people around me and just like really honestly being a little bit confused, quite frankly, about Harlem.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Confused #Real #People

There is no pedestrian culture [in South Central Los Angeles].
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Culture #Los Angeles #Pedestrians

I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Artist #Thinking #Play

One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the ability to engage the world in all of its myriad purposes, transformations, and incarnations.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Art #Believe #Cynical

You'll find that street casting in America is a lot different than street casting in different nations.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#America #Different #Casting

At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Flesh #Painting #Enjoy

When the fat lady comes out to sing, we don't know how she feels that day. We don't know if she's suffering from a cold or is mourning a death or falling in love. We don't know. But so all of that chance is the performance.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Falling In Love #Mourning #Suffering

While I can hire out the portrait, I don't, because it's just - that's where I shine. You know, that's my blood sport.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Sports #Blood #Shining

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Thinking #Ideas #Machines

There's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and how it bounces across the skin. The way that blues and purples come into play. In India and Sri Lanka, it was no different. It became a moment in which I had an opportunity to learn as a painter how to create the body in full form, and that's a very material and aesthetic thing. This is not conceptual. It's all an abstraction.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Opportunity #Reality #Light

You know, I'm incredibly blessed to be able to have this level of choice as an artist today. In this economy, it's something that I, you know, pinch myself at constantly, just thinking about how I could wake up tomorrow and decide I'm going to start painting this or that. So it's good.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Blessed #Artist #Thinking

Usually I bring very attractive women with me to excite interest. I mean, it's a type of, like, strangers-with-candy situation.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Mean #Stranger #Attractive

You have to bring books to explain your work.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Book

There's a team of filmmakers who follow me in the streets when I'm finding these models, to give me a sense of legitimacy to a casual stranger. This is New York City. No one's going to follow you back to your studio.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#New York #Team #Cities

I like to play with the conventions around what we expect of paintings historically. But I also like to play with the conventions that you expect from a Kehinde Wiley painting, too.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Play #Painting #Conventions

I love being able to have a team.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Team #Love Is #Able

I love the flexibility of saying, "Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work." But in the end, it's a possibility.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Hands #Feet #Today

While it may seem a little mundane, the material realities of realizing the painting actually have a lot to do with how you should read the painting. For example, we assume that what the model is wearing is what we found him in in the streets. No; in fact, a lot of what happens is that in Photoshop certain aspects are being heightened or diminished. There is no actual material truth in these paintings.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Reality #Example #May

Whereas I remember being in Dakar, in Senegal, where I have my third studio, and street casting, and I remember looking at the faces of the young men that we were speaking to through translators and so on, showing them the books. Complete - completely different response.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Book #Men #Faces

There are just so many different types of people that come into my studio, and secondarily, there's the idea of ideation, like, "Who are you and what do you see in yourself in this other person?" So many different people that you would see so many different things.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Ideas #People #Different

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Painting #Influence #Ends

Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.
-- Kehinde Wiley

#Fun #Love Is #Interesting