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

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

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.

The artists ultimately respond to the public.

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

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.

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.