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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
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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
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More quotes by Kehinde Wiley
In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.
Kehinde Wiley
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
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
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
I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.
Kehinde Wiley
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
There's something really cool about being able to fly to South Africa and watch one of the most talented African footballers wearing a shoe on the field.
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
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
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
Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
Kehinde Wiley
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
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
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.
Kehinde Wiley
I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.
Kehinde Wiley
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.
Kehinde Wiley
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
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
This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history.
Kehinde Wiley
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
