110+ Kehinde Wiley Quotes On Art, Education And Justice

Kehinde Wiley is a contemporary artist from Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his vibrant, large-scale paintings of African-Americans in heroic poses, often inspired by classical European art. His work has been featured in galleries and museums around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Kehinde Wiley on art, leadership, education.

Top 10 Kehinde Wiley Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.
5. Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.
6. I try to create a place of disorientation.
7. I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
8. Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.
9. I think what we should concentrate on is what it feels like to be a working artist in the day to day. One doesn't imagine what comes down the line.
10. I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.

Kehinde Wiley Short Quotes

• Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.
• I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play.
• The artists ultimately respond to the public.
• I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
• I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.
• That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.
• I think that at its best you just have to respect each arena for what they can do well.
• I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.
• As a twin, I operate with twin desires.
• At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.

Kehinde Wiley Quotes About Art

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. — Kehinde Wiley

One of my most strong memories was studying with Mel Bochner, one of the, I think, high water marks of American conceptual art. — Kehinde Wiley

In our conversations, he [Michael Jackson] revealed a surprising understanding of art history. We were going through the finer points of the difference between one Italian sculptor to the next. You know, this - these are things that we don't necessarily assume of people in sanctified light. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works. — Kehinde Wiley

I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work. — Kehinde Wiley

This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history. — Kehinde Wiley

He [Michael Jackson] would choose specific moments. They were art history books that I prefer. They were paintings that he prefers. It's this dance back and forth. We were halfway through the dance. He died. — Kehinde Wiley

Mel [Bochner] sets a very high standard. He expects only the best and most thoughtful and rigorous examinations, not only of the history of art but your own practice. — Kehinde Wiley

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

Kehinde Wiley Quotes About Education

People who - and I think that's been a huge education for me. I think it's a - it's a privilege to be able to meet such a broad cross-section of New York and increasingly the world, and to get a feel of how people respond to visual culture. — Kehinde Wiley

After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries. — 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

I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process. — 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, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process. — Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley Quotes About Love

I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black America as something that not only can be mined in a very sort of cynical, cold way, but also embraced in a very personal, love-driven way; but also sort of critiqued. — 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 work comes from. — Kehinde Wiley

When the fat lady comes out to sing, we don't know how she feels that day. We don't know if she's suffering from a cold or is mourning a death or falling in love. We don't know. But so all of that chance is the performance. — Kehinde Wiley

I love the flexibility of saying, "Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work." But in the end, it's a possibility. — Kehinde Wiley

I love being able to have a team. — Kehinde Wiley

I love being a portraitist. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

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

Kehinde Wiley Quotes About View

Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about. — Kehinde Wiley

It never really understood its own situational luxury. And I think that by and large the privilege of being Kehinde Wiley in the 21st century, making these high-priced luxury goods, traveling the world, pointing at these people, behooves me to have a point of view and to say something about it. — Kehinde Wiley

If I were making paintings of a bowl of fruit it would still be viewed through some sort of political lens, because the viewer wants to create a type of narrative around the political theme when they look at work depicting black and brown models. — Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley Quotes About Figurative

At age 20 I went to go find my father in Nigeria. And after much toil, I finally figured out exactly where he was. And there's something about seeing your father for the first time - my mother destroyed all pictures of him. — Kehinde Wiley

My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem [New York, NY]. I wanted to know what that was about. I would actually pull people from off of the streets and ask them to come to my studio. — Kehinde Wiley

I enjoy Chicago as one of the great American cities. When I come here and take a taxi from the airport, I meet a young man from Somalia. I meet a young man from Eritrea who engages with this nation with a sense of hope and a sense of desire. But we also we know that there are other elements of this nation that are toxic. — Kehinde Wiley

I'd like to walk that fine line between the authentic artist self and the manufactured artist self. I'd like to exist outside of a set of expectations or assumptions about what the Kehinde Wiley brand is. And I'd like to walk towards something that's a bit more unpredictable, human. — Kehinde Wiley

I think it's really useful to create parameters. The term you use can be forwarded into something more like a grid, a rubric, a system that you apply to all environments, and in so doing you create a situation in which you can locate local color, local differences within new environments. — 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

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. — Kehinde Wiley

It's a culture. It's - I mean, people obsess over this. And people create subcultures that identify - and there are people in the streets who will recognize certain patterns and signifiers. — Kehinde Wiley

I use those expectations as a color on my palette, a certain temperature in the room. You can use those expectations for the great punchline, but also for a great painting, in society. — Kehinde Wiley

I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's in these streets that day? — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

There are just so many different types of people that come into my studio, and secondarily, there's the idea of ideation, like, "Who are you and what do you see in yourself in this other person?" So many different people that you would see so many different things. — Kehinde Wiley

What we have now is a communication ability. We have the ability to see working ideas that are going on in the great cities throughout the world and whether you live in Shanghai or you live in Sao Paulo, you have the ability of seeing and knowing the ideas of some of the greatest minds of our generation. — Kehinde Wiley

Just physically, if you looked at the house that I grew up in, my mother created this greenhouse. And surrounded the entire property. And there was, like, trees and sculptures and like - it was, like, this crazy, like, secret garden space. — Kehinde Wiley

If I have the same plan to go into the streets, find random strangers, use art-historical referent from their - from the specific location, to use decorative patterns from this location, that's a rule. That's a set of patterns that you can apply to all societies. But what gives rise or what comes out of each experiment is so radically different. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

[My twin brother] he was the star artist of the family as we - as we were growing up. He eventually lost interest and went more towards literature and then medicine and then business and so on. But for me it became something that I did well. And it felt great being able to make something look like something. — 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 between living with - imagine if this were sitting in your living room for 15 years. You'd probably understand the contours of it. — Kehinde Wiley

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about. — Kehinde Wiley

The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale]. — Kehinde Wiley

There's a team of filmmakers who follow me in the streets when I'm finding these models, to give me a sense of legitimacy to a casual stranger. This is New York City. No one's going to follow you back to your studio. — Kehinde Wiley

Mel Bochner was able to give me the tools to look at those types of experiences, register them with my own, but also hold them far enough away to see them 360. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

I was recently in Israel doing my work and casting for models in the streets of Haifa and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, meeting young Israelis and Palestinians and Falasha, Ethiopian Jews who had migrated to Israel in the '70s. They're obsessed with Bob Marley. They're obsessed with Kanye West. They're obsessed with resistance culture, people who find that they're not necessarily comfortable in their own personal and national skin. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — 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

It was something that came sort of matter-of-factually. Because there - it's like really - real honest engagement with the people around me and just like really honestly being a little bit confused, quite frankly, about Harlem. — Kehinde Wiley

And as a young black man, a lot of my professors would really think that it was useful to see the work of politically oriented, positivistic, leftist creative works. And I found it incredibly useful. And I found it something that I've learned from and gained from. — Kehinde Wiley

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. — Kehinde Wiley

Like, the smells and the sights and the sounds. As an artist, you want to sort of be able to engage that and get that down in some way. This is - this is a type of familiarity but a type of radical difference at the same time. — Kehinde Wiley

Can I - do I have to be obsessed with it and proceed from that? Not always. But when I'm on top of my game, I definitely think about the way that the world sees me and the way that the world thinks about painting. You must. — Kehinde Wiley

The ability to look at certain patterns with regards to urban fashion, with regards to swagger, with regards to cultural hegemony, with regards to the ways in which young people look at resistance culture as a pattern that should be mimicked and admired. — Kehinde Wiley

[My parents] met in university back in the '70s. And I didn't grow up with my father. He - they separated before I was born. — Kehinde Wiley

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

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. — Kehinde Wiley

I think that at its best, painting can be an act of juggling perceptions, a hall of mirrors. And it can be a bit confusing and scattering. But as the artist, as the man behind the velvet rope who controls the smoke and the mirrors and the way that things move in the painted space, what I want to do is to try my best to be a good witness. — Kehinde Wiley

For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements. — Kehinde Wiley

My mother's from Texas. Small town outside of Waco called Downsville. And my father's from Nigeria. And so I guess I'm properly African-American. — Kehinde Wiley

What's interesting about my project recently is that I'm going out into broader global spaces but then isolating at the same time - sort of pushing out but then pulling in. — Kehinde Wiley

The expectations of the viewer are what you're asking about. And the expectations of the viewer are manifold. However, they are very fixed, given who I am in the world. People have certain expectations of me as an artist. — 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 expectation of a political corrective that demands that the artist fixes the ills of the world. — 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

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. — Kehinde Wiley

It was probably one of the things that gave me a sense of possibility and allowed for me to see beyond the small community that I existed within. You know, I was making friends with young Soviet kids. this is during perestroika. You know, there's bread lines and vodka lines. The entire social structure of what was then the Soviet Union was radically different from what we know today. — Kehinde Wiley

Much like teaching art to young art students age 10 to 15 or so on, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces, essential components. You have to - you know, at this point I'm so used to operating within given assumptions about art. But when you're explaining art to art students or people who are new to this experience, you have to really go back to the fundamentals. — Kehinde Wiley

I noticed that the work of my non - I noticed that the work of my friends who were white and male, specifically, existed in a type of freedom that was not bound by certain political questions and assumptions and locations. — Kehinde Wiley

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars. — Kehinde Wiley

When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative. — Kehinde Wiley

You have to bring books to explain your work. — Kehinde Wiley

Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art. — Kehinde Wiley

Most people say, "Hell, no. I don't know who you are. This scares me. Like, I'm not interested in this."Another way of looking at these paintings is, these are the guys who said yes. — Kehinde Wiley

Whereas I remember being in Dakar, in Senegal, where I have my third studio, and street casting, and I remember looking at the faces of the young men that we were speaking to through translators and so on, showing them the books. Complete - completely different response. — Kehinde Wiley

I've met others [people] who simply responded to me, "You're Kehinde Wiley. I know your work. I saw it at the Brooklyn Museum [Brooklyn, NY] And I'd be honored to be in your work." — Kehinde Wiley

There were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist. — Kehinde Wiley

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

I think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive. — Kehinde Wiley

There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings. — Kehinde Wiley

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real. — Kehinde Wiley

While it may seem a little mundane, the material realities of realizing the painting actually have a lot to do with how you should read the painting. For example, we assume that what the model is wearing is what we found him in in the streets. No; in fact, a lot of what happens is that in Photoshop certain aspects are being heightened or diminished. There is no actual material truth in these paintings. — Kehinde Wiley

I pay my models to work with me, so there becomes this weird sort of economic bartering thing, which made me feel really sort of uncomfortable, almost as though you were buying into a situation - which, again, is another way of looking at those paintings. The body language in those paintings is a lot more stiff. — 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 even into the twentieth, that allows Europe to look at Africa, Asia Minor, or East Asia in a way that's revelatory but also as a place in which you can empty yourself out. A place in which there is no place. It's an emptiness and a location at once. — Kehinde Wiley

How does the artist function as poet-slash-witness-slash-trickster? — Kehinde Wiley

I love the of dealing with the homoerotic versus the idea of dealing with certain tropes with regards to black masculinity in the world, propensity towards sports, antisocial behavior, hypersexuality - all of these sort of non-truths that I don't exist in but that I see as being fixed in the world's imagination. — Kehinde Wiley

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

You know, one of my - one of my best and, I think, most enlightening moments was when I was contacted by Michael Jackson. And he requested that I paint his portrait. — Kehinde Wiley

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation. — Kehinde Wiley

That's what I think my job in the world has been, is to sort of try to sit silently a bit and watch it all sort of move and see those small, quiet details, whether it be a small village outside of Colombo [country?] or the favelas of Brazil, where, again, resistance culture is something that you hear resonating in the streets of South Central Los Angeles as well. — Kehinde Wiley

Just so [becoming a chef ] that I could support my art habit. You know? I mean, this is - this is something where you've been literally given an opportunity to put the world on pause for a second. — Kehinde Wiley

When I look back at my paintings, they don't give me a sense of where I was when I first met that guy. They don't give me a sense of what I felt like when I first saw that original source material. They give me a sense of the world that I'm trying to create. And we all just have to deal with that. — Kehinde Wiley

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

Life Lessons by Kehinde Wiley

1. Kehinde Wiley's work teaches us to celebrate and recognize the beauty in all people, regardless of race, gender, or class.
2. His vibrant, intricate portraits remind us that everyone has a unique story to tell, and that everyone deserves to be seen and appreciated.
3. Through his art, Wiley encourages us to challenge traditional notions of beauty and to create a more inclusive and equitable world.