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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.

Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Standard
Standards
Practice
Examinations
High
Rigorous
History
Expects
Art
Examination
Best
Thoughtful
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More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

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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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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.
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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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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Mel [ Bochner] held large-form meetings with students. But the stronger points came through when we had the one-on-one critiques. And that's the system that works at Yale. There's the group critiques, and then there's the one-on-one critiques that happen in studio.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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?
Kehinde Wiley
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As a twin, I operate with twin desires.
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 think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
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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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
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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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That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.
Kehinde Wiley
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I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.
Kehinde Wiley
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I would imagine that what you try to do is to - is to be as sensitive to the environment that surrounds you as possible. As you see, my work has become increasingly global. My presence in the world has become increasingly global.
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