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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
Finding
Streets
Contingency
Fact
Random
Given
Strangers
Facts
Radical
Mean
Stranger
Going
Exists
Findings

More quotes by 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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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.
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I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
Kehinde Wiley
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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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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.
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I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.
Kehinde Wiley
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The ability to look at certain patterns with regards to urban fashion, with regards to swagger, with regards to cultural hegemony, with regards to the ways in which young people look at resistance culture as a pattern that should be mimicked and admired.
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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.
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I love being a portraitist.
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 have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.
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.
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I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.
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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When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
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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I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.
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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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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I love being able to have a team.
Kehinde Wiley