This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history.

After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.

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.

As a twin, I operate with twin desires.

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.

What's interesting about my project recently is that I'm going out into broader global spaces but then isolating at the same time - sort of pushing out but then pulling in.

I think that once you're able to sort of get in line with who and how you relate to the world, you'll become closer to this index that I'm referring to. Because what you want is this card that relates to that book. What you want is this human that relates to this world, rather than having this art school society scattering that point of view somewhere in between. It becomes diffused. And that level of clarity, I think, was gained at the Studio Museum in Harlem.