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I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.

Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Going
Wild
Think
Streets
Thinking
Brother
Like
Art
Kids
School
Together
Twin
Matter
Twins

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

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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
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I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem [New York, NY]. I wanted to know what that was about. I would actually pull people from off of the streets and ask them to come to my studio.
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I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
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I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.
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That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.
Kehinde Wiley
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My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.
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Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about.
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
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[My parents] met in university back in the '70s. And I didn't grow up with my father. He - they separated before I was born.
Kehinde Wiley
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Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.
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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 think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.
Kehinde Wiley
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I think that I'm increasingly aware of the fact that in order to work towards any statement that's radically global or universal, you have to start in a place that's radically intimate and particular.
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.
Kehinde Wiley
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Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.
Kehinde Wiley
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I love the flexibility of saying, Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work. But in the end, it's a possibility.
Kehinde Wiley
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I had an amazing instructor, Joseph Gotto , who, as a painter, spoke to me as it - he didn't condescend.
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I love being able to have a team.
Kehinde Wiley
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I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.
Kehinde Wiley