I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black America as something that not only can be mined in a very sort of cynical, cold way, but also embraced in a very personal, love-driven way; but also sort of critiqued.
Kehinde WileyI like to play with the conventions around what we expect of paintings historically. But I also like to play with the conventions that you expect from a Kehinde Wiley painting, too.
Kehinde WileyI was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.
Kehinde WileyWhat's interesting about young black American artists within the twentieth century, and increasingly within the twenty-first as well, is that there's this expectation of a political corrective that demands that the artist fixes the ills of the world.
Kehinde WileyIt was probably one of the things that gave me a sense of possibility and allowed for me to see beyond the small community that I existed within. You know, I was making friends with young Soviet kids. this is during perestroika. You know, there's bread lines and vodka lines. The entire social structure of what was then the Soviet Union was radically different from what we know today.
Kehinde WileyI pay my models to work with me, so there becomes this weird sort of economic bartering thing, which made me feel really sort of uncomfortable, almost as though you were buying into a situation - which, again, is another way of looking at those paintings. The body language in those paintings is a lot more stiff.
Kehinde Wiley