Kehinde Wiley

My love affair with painting is bittersweet.

— Kehinde Wiley

The artists ultimately respond to the public.

— Kehinde Wiley

I love being able to have a team.

— Kehinde Wiley

We all look at the same object in different ways.

— Kehinde Wiley

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

As a twin, I operate with twin desires.

— Kehinde Wiley

All art is self-portraiture.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.

— Kehinde Wiley

I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!

— Kehinde Wiley

For me, I wanted to create something that's much more driven by a type of selfishness, a type of decadence.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time.

— Kehinde Wiley

I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.

— Kehinde Wiley

A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I've jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there's a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer…

— Kehinde Wiley

Is it the responsibility of the colored artist or the ethnic artist to create works that are designed to exist in opposition…

— Kehinde Wiley

I had no idea about where I was going. I had no sense of art as anything other than a problem to…

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love…

— Kehinde Wiley

Going back to that idea that painting sits still and that we give ourselves over to it over time. There's a difference…

— Kehinde Wiley

When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say…

— 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

That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings…

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've…

— Kehinde Wiley

So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in…

— Kehinde Wiley

I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very…

— Kehinde Wiley

It felt really radically uncomfortable. And I was really not sure at first about releasing that body of work. But then the…

— Kehinde Wiley

There's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and…

— Kehinde Wiley

At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.

— Kehinde Wiley