Kehinde Wiley

“So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.”

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

“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.”

“If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw.”

“I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.”

“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.”

“Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends.”

“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.”

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

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

“Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.”

“Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.”

“My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic.”

“Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.”

“At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings.”

“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.”

“My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.”

“The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it.”

“I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do.”

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