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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.

Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Opportunities
Virtue
Opportunity
Mother
Availed
Art
Foresight
Surrounded
Educational

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

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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.
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I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's in these streets that day?
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There is a political and racial context behind everything that I do. Not always because I design it that way, or because I want it that way, but rather because it's just the way people look at the work of an African-American artist in this country.
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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.
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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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There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings.
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I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.
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That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.
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The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].
Kehinde Wiley
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All the world's a stage. P.T. Barnum: It becomes a circus. But circuses or street pageants or parades have always been useful in a society.They've always been useful as a way of critiquing power. The carnivalesque has always been useful as a way of the powerful being mocked in a public space.
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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.
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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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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
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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.
Kehinde Wiley