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Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Situation
Class
Situational
Race
Sexuality
Within
Gender
Nations
Exists
Nation
Painting
Particular

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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What's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice, painting simply sits there silently and begs you to notice the smallest of detail.
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Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.
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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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What's interesting about young black American artists within the twentieth century, and increasingly within the twenty-first as well, is that there's this expectation of a political corrective that demands that the artist fixes the ills of the world.
Kehinde Wiley
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Just physically, if you looked at the house that I grew up in, my mother created this greenhouse. And surrounded the entire property. And there was, like, trees and sculptures and like - it was, like, this crazy, like, secret garden space.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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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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As a twin, I operate with twin desires.
Kehinde Wiley
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I enjoy Chicago as one of the great American cities. When I come here and take a taxi from the airport, I meet a young man from Somalia. I meet a young man from Eritrea who engages with this nation with a sense of hope and a sense of desire. But we also we know that there are other elements of this nation that are toxic.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.
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 think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
Kehinde Wiley
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Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.
Kehinde Wiley
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You'll find that street casting in America is a lot different than street casting in different nations.
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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.
Kehinde Wiley
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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