Kehinde Wiley

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

“Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.”

“I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there.”

“By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.”

“Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it.”

“You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.”

“I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

“As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook.”

“The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.”

“Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.”

“Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.”

“What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the st...”

“In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.”

“Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.”

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

“Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.”

“In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.”

“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.”

“You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.”

“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.”