After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.

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.

I think that gave rise to the type of practice that I - that I do now. I think it was informed by a very Marxist almost "use-value"-driven investigation of painting as agent. These are high-priced luxury goods for wealthy consumers, which are designed to deliver certain communicative effects.

The ability to look at certain patterns with regards to urban fashion, with regards to swagger, with regards to cultural hegemony, with regards to the ways in which young people look at resistance culture as a pattern that should be mimicked and admired.

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

I think that the Kehinde Wiley brand is something that I'm working towards expanding and to inclusion.

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