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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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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Take
American
Airports
Great
Hope
Toxic
Men
Enjoy
Chicago
Desire
Elements
Eritrea
Sense
Meet
Somalia
Also
Nation
Engages
Young
Cities
Airport
Come
Nations
Taxi

More quotes by 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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So sometimes you have to play your hand and sort of push in a direction. And I think that masculinity is the driving point for a lot of the way that people, like, posture in the work.
Kehinde Wiley
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In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.
Kehinde Wiley
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I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.
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 surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.
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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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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I suppose in the end what shift occurred - is that at Yale I began to become more materially and conceptually aware of the mechanisms that gave rise to those types of patterns and paintings. And so the copying that happened in the childhood was a much more conscious type of copying in later years.
Kehinde Wiley
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He's a great - he's a great professor. He retired recently, but.But Peter Halley as well.
Kehinde Wiley
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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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It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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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Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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I actually studied cooking and, like, was thinking about becoming a chef.
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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Mel [Bochner] sets a very high standard. He expects only the best and most thoughtful and rigorous examinations, not only of the history of art but your own practice.
Kehinde Wiley