This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.
— Kehinde Wiley
When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.
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.
What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe.
If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way.
Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope.
What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture.
My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north.
It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.
For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing.
Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.
I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.
Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends.
The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it.
Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.
I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art.
I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.
So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.
My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.
In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.
Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.
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.
The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.
Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock every day, is what gave me this sensibility and drove me to explore my fascination with art.
If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw.
What you have in my work is one person's path as he travels through the world, and there is no limitation of what is conceivable.
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.
Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it.
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.
When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.
I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.
I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.
It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.
What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.
It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.
As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook.
Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies?
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
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.
I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.
I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.
At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking.
There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.
My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.
The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.
The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time.
I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.
When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.
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.
