Quote

Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.

Kehinde Wiley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Thinking
Imagine
Collections
Doesn
Southern
Art
Capital
Best
California
Huntington
Important
Library
Portraiture
Great
British
Radically
Going
Garden
Gardens
Think
Century
Libraries

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

Image
There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
There's quite obviously the desire to open the rule sets that allow for inclusion or disclusion. I think that my hope would be that my work set up certain type of precedent, that allowed for great institutions, museums and viewers to see the possibilities of painting culture to be a bit more inclusive.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
There's always a tug of war. Like, in the States, in America, there's certainly a higher quotient, I would imagine, of, like, macho, like, masculinity posturing.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
People who - and I think that's been a huge education for me. I think it's a - it's a privilege to be able to meet such a broad cross-section of New York and increasingly the world, and to get a feel of how people respond to visual culture.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I love being a portraitist.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
There was no image of the other biological half of myself. And as an artists, as a - as an - as a portraitist, the look of who you are was radically important to me.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
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.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
What's interesting about my project recently is that I'm going out into broader global spaces but then isolating at the same time - sort of pushing out but then pulling in.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
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.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
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.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.
Kehinde Wiley