Quotes from Kehinde Wiley

My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north.

The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time.

At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.

What's interesting about my project recently is that I'm going out into broader global spaces but then isolating at the same time - sort of pushing out but then pulling in.

My peers at the time: you know, young black kids from off the streets of Harlem, having these conversations with me in my small, dirty little studio up in Harlem.

Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies?

This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.

I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.

There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.

I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.

In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination.

There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.

Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.

I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

I love being able to have a team.

I love being a portraitist.

Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic.

I've fished everywhere I've traveled.

What you have in my work is one person's path as he travels through the world, and there is no limitation of what is conceivable.

Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock every day, is what gave me this sensibility and drove me to explore my fascination with art.

What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.

In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.