Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

He's a great - he's a great professor. He retired recently, but.But Peter Halley as well.

— Kehinde Wiley

I actually studied cooking and, like, was thinking about becoming a chef.

— Kehinde Wiley

I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.

— Kehinde Wiley

I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.

— Kehinde Wiley

I think that at its best you just have to respect each arena for what they can do well.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play.

— Kehinde Wiley

In America, there's this type of expectation of just-add-water celebrity, this type of, "Of course you found me; we're all going to…

— Kehinde Wiley

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together,…

— Kehinde Wiley

The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It…

— Kehinde Wiley

[My parents] met in university back in the '70s. And I didn't grow up with my father. He - they separated before…

— Kehinde Wiley

By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who…

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I'd like to walk that fine line between the authentic artist self and the manufactured artist self. I'd like to exist outside…

— Kehinde Wiley

What's interesting about young black American artists within the twentieth century, and increasingly within the twenty-first as well, is that there's this…

— Kehinde Wiley

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being…

— Kehinde Wiley

And as a young black man, a lot of my professors would really think that it was useful to see the work…

— Kehinde Wiley

I was recently in Israel doing my work and casting for models in the streets of Haifa and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,…

— Kehinde Wiley

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…

— Kehinde Wiley

In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at…

— Kehinde Wiley

Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock…

— Kehinde Wiley

I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.

— Kehinde Wiley

One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.

— Kehinde Wiley

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

— Kehinde Wiley

Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.

— Kehinde Wiley

There is no pedestrian culture [in South Central Los Angeles].

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in…

— Kehinde Wiley

I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to…

— Kehinde Wiley

There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic…

— Kehinde Wiley

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

— Kehinde Wiley

I've met others [people] who simply responded to me, "You're Kehinde Wiley. I know your work. I saw it at the Brooklyn…

— Kehinde Wiley

I have been painting models with black and brown skin only for the past years. So, I did already have this experience,…

— Kehinde Wiley