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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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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Questions
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Answers
Provocations
Rather
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Artist
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More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

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I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
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I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.
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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 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.
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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.
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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 think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.
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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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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.
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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.
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I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.
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The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].
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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.
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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.
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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 think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.
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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.
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I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
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I had an amazing instructor, Joseph Gotto , who, as a painter, spoke to me as it - he didn't condescend.
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