Kehinde Wiley
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.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Art
Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.Collection: Respect
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.Collection: Sad
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Amazing
Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Thankful
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.Collection: Cool
Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.Collection: Age
The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.Collection: Power
Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.Collection: Finance
I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.Collection: Thinking
What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or allows to consider the world in a slightly different way.Collection: Art
There is a political and racial context behind everything that I do. Not always because I design it that way, or because I want it that way, but rather because it's just the way people look at the work of an African-American artist in this country.Collection: Country
I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.Collection: Artist
In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.Collection: Understanding
All art is self-portraiture.Collection: Art
The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.Collection: Fighting
I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.Collection: Believe
Women are expected to identify gender as a starting point. Ethnicities are expected to identify that as a location. Is it ever possible for the artist to imagine a state of absolute freedom? That was my call to arms.Collection: Artist
I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.Collection: Believe
I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.Collection: Mean
When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.Collection: Narrative
This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new. This desire to throw away the old rules.Collection: Father
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 just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.Collection: Thinking
There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.Collection: Vocabulary
So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.Collection: Differences
Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.Collection: Race
That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.Collection: Girl
I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.Collection: Art
We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.Collection: Games
I think that I'm increasingly aware of the fact that in order to work towards any statement that's radically global or universal, you have to start in a place that's radically intimate and particular.Collection: Thinking
There's quite obviously the desire to open the rule sets that allow for inclusion or disclusion. I think that my hope would be that my work set up certain type of precedent, that allowed for great institutions, museums and viewers to see the possibilities of painting culture to be a bit more inclusive.Collection: Thinking
Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.Collection: Past
I feel sometimes constrained by the expectation that the work should be solely political. I try to create a type of work that is at the service of my own set of criteria, which have to do with beauty and a type of utopia that in some ways speaks to the culture I'm located in.Collection: Expectations
What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety. So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.Collection: Thinking
All the world's a stage. P.T. Barnum: It becomes a circus. But circuses or street pageants or parades have always been useful in a society.They've always been useful as a way of critiquing power. The carnivalesque has always been useful as a way of the powerful being mocked in a public space.Collection: Powerful
Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.Collection: Thinking
That's the trouble with, I think, my - the contemporary read of my work. So many people just simply say, "These are pretty pictures of black boys." They're not really thinking about, like, what the whole thing is.Collection: Thinking
I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.Collection: Mother
I have been painting models with black and brown skin only for the past years. So, I did already have this experience, this is how I have come to the paintings I do now.Collection: Past
Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.Collection: Artist
My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.Collection: Flower
There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.Collection: Art
Joseph Gotto, yeah. Just all-around one of the more inspiring artists - not because of any sort of specific content direction, but rather the respect that I had for his own work and the ability for him to translate his ideas into useful form for me as a student.Collection: Artist
I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play.Collection: Artist
One of my most strong memories was studying with Mel Bochner, one of the, I think, high water marks of American conceptual art.Collection: Art
I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.Collection: Mother
I suppose in the end what shift occurred - is that at Yale I began to become more materially and conceptually aware of the mechanisms that gave rise to those types of patterns and paintings. And so the copying that happened in the childhood was a much more conscious type of copying in later years.Collection: Yale