Author Profile
Kehinde Wiley
1977 • American • Artist
61
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 61 quotesThe 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.— Kehinde Wiley
I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.— Kehinde Wiley
One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.— Kehinde Wiley
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.— Kehinde Wiley
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.— Kehinde Wiley
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.— Kehinde Wiley
The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.— Kehinde Wiley
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.— Kehinde Wiley
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.— Kehinde Wiley
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.— Kehinde Wiley
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.— Kehinde Wiley
I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.— Kehinde Wiley
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.— Kehinde Wiley
I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.— Kehinde Wiley