Kehinde Wiley

The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it.

I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.

One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.

What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body.

In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.

When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers.

The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.

My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked.

I've fished everywhere I've traveled.

Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.

I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated - I'm not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization - what I'm trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don't really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily.

In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.

I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.

I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.

As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook.

I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.

The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.

The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time.

When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.

Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.