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

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

— 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

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

You'll find that street casting in America is a lot different than street casting in different nations.

— Kehinde Wiley

I think that the Kehinde Wiley brand is something that I'm working towards expanding and to inclusion.

— Kehinde Wiley

I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— 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

When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I…

— Kehinde Wiley

Usually I bring very attractive women with me to excite interest. I mean, it's a type of, like, strangers-with-candy situation.

— Kehinde Wiley

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the…

— Kehinde Wiley

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of…

— Kehinde Wiley

When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that…

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.

— Kehinde Wiley

That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— 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

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

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— Kehinde Wiley

I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.

— Kehinde Wiley

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

— 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