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My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.

Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Work
Decorative
Assistants
Concentrate
Flowers
Generally
Figure
Figures
Flower

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I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.
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He's a great - he's a great professor. He retired recently, but.But Peter Halley as well.
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I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.
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I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
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Just so [becoming a chef ] that I could support my art habit. You know? I mean, this is - this is something where you've been literally given an opportunity to put the world on pause for a second.
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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.
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I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.
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I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.
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A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.
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You'll find that street casting in America is a lot different than street casting in different nations.
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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.
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Most people say, Hell, no. I don't know who you are. This scares me. Like, I'm not interested in this.Another way of looking at these paintings is, these are the guys who said yes.
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So much of the hubris that surrounded conceptual art in the 1950s through '70s was that it had this arrogant presupposition that pointing in and of itself was a creative act. It never rigorously politically and socially analyzed the fact that the luxury to point is something that so many people throughout the world don't have.
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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.
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I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.
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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.
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When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
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I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.
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Mel [Bochner] sets a very high standard. He expects only the best and most thoughtful and rigorous examinations, not only of the history of art but your own practice.
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I suppose in the end what shift occurred - is that at Yale I began to become more materially and conceptually aware of the mechanisms that gave rise to those types of patterns and paintings. And so the copying that happened in the childhood was a much more conscious type of copying in later years.
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