Quotes from Kehinde Wiley

The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

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.

I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.

I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.

There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.

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.

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.

It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.

I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.

You have to bring books to explain your work.

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.

I love the flexibility of saying, "Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work." But in the end, it's a possibility.

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.

I've met others [people] who simply responded to me, "You're Kehinde Wiley. I know your work. I saw it at the Brooklyn Museum [Brooklyn, NY] And I'd be honored to be in your work."

When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.

At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking.

The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.

I've jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there's a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer - my version of him - that's in his collection.

In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be.

I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.

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.

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.

This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new. This desire to throw away the old rules.