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World Quotes by Kehinde Wiley

38 World quotes by Kehinde Wiley

All World quotes Kehinde Wiley’s page

Kehinde Wiley sees art as a magical garden where known ideas are rearranged to reveal fresh meaning. He notes that when cynicism spreads, art can still include Black men and challenge the hubris of past conceptual trends. He also likens society to a circus, using street pageants as mirrors of culture.

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

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I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.

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

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

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Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.

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In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender…

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

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I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I…

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I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them…

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Just so [becoming a chef ] that I could support my art habit. You know? I mean, this is - this is…

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

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I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to…

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The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what…

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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…

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All the world's a stage. P.T. Barnum: It becomes a circus. But circuses or street pageants or parades have always been useful…

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What we have now is a communication ability. We have the ability to see working ideas that are going on in the…

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I think that once you're able to sort of get in line with who and how you relate to the world, you'll…

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In high school I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. And this is like Fame. It's like…

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I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what…

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That's what I think my job in the world has been, is to sort of try to sit silently a bit and…

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I think what's really interesting and useful about this question is that ultimately all art is a type of self-portraiture. And so…

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What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we…

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

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

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

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Even the hubris or the desire to go out into the world and find patterns that reflect back to yourself is so…

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The expectations of the viewer are what you're asking about. And the expectations of the viewer are manifold. However, they are very…

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It never really understood its own situational luxury. And I think that by and large the privilege of being Kehinde Wiley in…

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I love the of dealing with the homoerotic versus the idea of dealing with certain tropes with regards to black masculinity in…

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I would imagine that what you try to do is to - is to be as sensitive to the environment that surrounds…

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So much of the hubris that surrounded conceptual art in the 1950s through '70s was that it had this arrogant presupposition that…

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One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing…

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People who - and I think that's been a huge education for me. I think it's a - it's a privilege to…

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Can I - do I have to be obsessed with it and proceed from that? Not always. But when I'm on top…

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The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States - quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world…

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What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something…

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When I look back at my paintings, they don't give me a sense of where I was when I first met that…

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I'm like a gypsy. I've got a place in Beijing, a place in New York, a place in west Africa; I'm working…

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More by Kehinde Wiley

Much like teaching art to young art students age 10 to 15 or so on, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces,…

The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely…

One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the…

At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if…

My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened,…

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

It was something that came sort of matter-of-factually. Because there - it's like really - real honest engagement with the people around me and…

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's…

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

There were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist.

I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black…

I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black…

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

Just physically, if you looked at the house that I grew up in, my mother created this greenhouse. And surrounded the entire property. And…