Quote

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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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Rules
Game
Toying
Ways
Portraiture
Sort
Viewing
Games
Questioning
Way
Received
Suppose
Historical

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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.
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It's a culture. It's - I mean, people obsess over this. And people create subcultures that identify - and there are people in the streets who will recognize certain patterns and signifiers.
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When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
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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.
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That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.
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Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.
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[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.
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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.
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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.
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Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.
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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.
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I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.
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Just so [becoming a chef ] that I could support my art habit. You know? I mean, this is - this is something where you've been literally given an opportunity to put the world on pause for a second.
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I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.
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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.
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I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.
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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.
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Like, the smells and the sights and the sounds. As an artist, you want to sort of be able to engage that and get that down in some way. This is - this is a type of familiarity but a type of radical difference at the same time.
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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.
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