Kehinde Wiley Quotes

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

There are just so many different types of people that come into my studio, and secondarily, there's the idea of ideation, like, "Who are you and what do you see in yourself in this other person?" So many different people that you would see so many different things.

I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play.

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.

I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.

I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

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

If I were making paintings of a bowl of fruit it would still be viewed through some sort of political lens, because the viewer wants to create a type of narrative around the political theme when they look at work depicting black and brown models.

When I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem, there was a type of freedom that existed where I didn't have to think about professors, where I didn't have to think about much of anything other than my own practice.

There's something really cool about being able to fly to South Africa and watch one of the most talented African footballers wearing a shoe on the field.

So sometimes you have to play your hand and sort of push in a direction. And I think that masculinity is the driving point for a lot of the way that people, like, posture in the work.

[My parents] met in university back in the '70s. And I didn't grow up with my father. He - they separated before I was born.

What'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.

I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.

Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.

The expectations of the viewer are what you're asking about. And the expectations of the viewer are manifold. However, they are very fixed, given who I am in the world. People have certain expectations of me as an artist.

I use those expectations as a color on my palette, a certain temperature in the room. You can use those expectations for the great punchline, but also for a great painting, in society.

So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.

I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

At age 20 I went to go find my father in Nigeria. And after much toil, I finally figured out exactly where he was. And there's something about seeing your father for the first time - my mother destroyed all pictures of him.

I enjoy Chicago as one of the great American cities. When I come here and take a taxi from the airport, I meet a young man from Somalia. I meet a young man from Eritrea who engages with this nation with a sense of hope and a sense of desire. But we also we know that there are other elements of this nation that are toxic.

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.

In high school I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. And this is like Fame. It's like that sort of prototypical, dancers in the hallway, theater students, musical students, art geeks. And it was a kindergarten in the truest sense of the world: a children's garden where I was able to sort of really come into myself as an artist, as a person, sexuality issues - like, all of this became something where there was a firming-up and a knowing that went on.

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.

I 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.

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 actually studied cooking and, like, was thinking about becoming a chef.

I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

Mel [ Bochner] held large-form meetings with students. But the stronger points came through when we had the one-on-one critiques. And that's the system that works at Yale. There's the group critiques, and then there's the one-on-one critiques that happen in studio.

I think that I'm increasingly aware of the fact that in order to work towards any statement that's radically global or universal, you have to start in a place that's radically intimate and particular.

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