What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.

I love being a portraitist.

Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

I've met others [people] who simply responded to me, "You're Kehinde Wiley. I know your work. I saw it at the Brooklyn Museum [Brooklyn, NY] And I'd be honored to be in your work."

I think it's really useful to create parameters. The term you use can be forwarded into something more like a grid, a rubric, a system that you apply to all environments, and in so doing you create a situation in which you can locate local color, local differences within new environments.

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.

A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.