Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.

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

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

For me, I wanted to create something that's much more driven by a type of selfishness, a type of decadence.

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.

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.

It felt really radically uncomfortable. And I was really not sure at first about releasing that body of work. But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought that that position, that location, is something that's just sort of interesting in its own right, as an experience, as a process. Again, we're talking about this rubric, this set of rules, this grid that I toss on top of different locations globally. This is what came out of Africa.