Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.
— Kehinde Wiley
The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.
The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States - quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world - means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids but every population group in this nation.
There's something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That's the magic of painting.
The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that.
The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at.
My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.
I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.
I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.
Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic.
Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends.
The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.
Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.
If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.
Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
I've jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there's a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer - my version of him - that's in his collection.
You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.
Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.
My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you're looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken.
Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.
I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.
There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.
My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys.
My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.
One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.
What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body.
In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.
Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.
I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.
I've fished everywhere I've traveled.
My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic.
I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated - I'm not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization - what I'm trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don't really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily.
I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.
Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.
There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.
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 on a place in Colombia. I like the fact that painting is portable - and I've wanted my entire life to be able to see the world, to respond to it, and make that my life's work.
It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you're a kid.
During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids.
I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.
I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.
The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it.
We all look at the same object in different ways.
My love affair with painting is bittersweet.
When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers.
Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.
My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked.
Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.
I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!
In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.
