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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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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Going
Exists
Findings
Finding
Streets
Contingency
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Random
Given
Strangers
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Stranger
More quotes by Kehinde Wiley
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
I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.
Kehinde Wiley
I have been painting models with black and brown skin only for the past years. So, I did already have this experience, this is how I have come to the paintings I do now.
Kehinde Wiley
It never really understood its own situational luxury. And I think that by and large the privilege of being Kehinde Wiley in the 21st century, making these high-priced luxury goods, traveling the world, pointing at these people, behooves me to have a point of view and to say something about it.
Kehinde Wiley
I love being a portraitist.
Kehinde Wiley
Women are expected to identify gender as a starting point. Ethnicities are expected to identify that as a location. Is it ever possible for the artist to imagine a state of absolute freedom? That was my call to arms.
Kehinde Wiley
I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.
Kehinde Wiley
[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
The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.
Kehinde Wiley
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.
Kehinde Wiley
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.
Kehinde Wiley
I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.
Kehinde Wiley
I've met others [people] who simply responded to me, You're Kehinde Wiley. I know your work. I saw it at the Brooklyn Museum [Brooklyn, NY] And I'd be honored to be in your work.
Kehinde Wiley
I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.
Kehinde Wiley
It was something that came sort of matter-of-factually. Because there - it's like really - real honest engagement with the people around me and just like really honestly being a little bit confused, quite frankly, about Harlem.
Kehinde Wiley
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
Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.
Kehinde Wiley
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
I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.
Kehinde Wiley
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
