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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
Virtue
Opportunity
Mother
Art
Availed
Foresight
Surrounded
Educational
Opportunities

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

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We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.
Kehinde Wiley
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As a twin, I operate with twin desires.
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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 one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.
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I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.
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I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
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Like, the smells and the sights and the sounds. As an artist, you want to sort of be able to engage that and get that down in some way. This is - this is a type of familiarity but a type of radical difference at the same time.
Kehinde Wiley
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I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.
Kehinde Wiley
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You know, one of my - one of my best and, I think, most enlightening moments was when I was contacted by Michael Jackson. And he requested that I paint his portrait.
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.
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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A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.
Kehinde Wiley
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One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the ability to engage the world in all of its myriad purposes, transformations, and incarnations.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
Kehinde Wiley
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I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley