It never really understood its own situational luxury. And I think that by and large the privilege of being Kehinde Wiley in the 21st century, making these high-priced luxury goods, traveling the world, pointing at these people, behooves me to have a point of view and to say something about it.
Kehinde WileyLike 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 WileyI 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 WileyMy paintings at their best take that vocabulary and attempt to transpose that into a form that gives respect not only to the history of painting but also to those people who look and sound like me.
Kehinde WileyI think what's really interesting and useful about this question is that ultimately all art is a type of self-portraiture. And so in the act of identifying yourself, you're using others to get to that point. And so you're parsing out different aspects of different people in the world. You're choosing not only from America but increasingly globally different aspects of what's out there.
Kehinde Wiley