All art is self-portraiture.

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

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

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.

And as a young black man, a lot of my professors would really think that it was useful to see the work of politically oriented, positivistic, leftist creative works. And I found it incredibly useful. And I found it something that I've learned from and gained from.

I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.

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.