Kehinde Wiley Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• All art is self-portraiture.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Self, Portraiture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the ability to engage the world in all of its myriad purposes, transformations, and incarnations.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Believe, Cynical

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Eye, Beholder

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Brother, Art, Kids

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I think one of the things that I took from Mel [Bochner] specifically was his ability to look at oneself and one's relationship to the history of art and the practice of art at arm's length, the ability to sort of clinically and coldly remove oneself from the picture and to see it simply as a set of rules, habits, systems, moving parts.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Moving, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• So much of the hubris that surrounded conceptual art in the 1950s through '70s was that it had this arrogant presupposition that pointing in and of itself was a creative act. It never rigorously politically and socially analyzed the fact that the luxury to point is something that so many people throughout the world don't have.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Luxury, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Girl, Art, Museums

  Interview with M.I.A., www.interviewmagazine.com. November 19, 2008.

• In high school I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. And this is like Fame. It's like that sort of prototypical, dancers in the hallway, theater students, musical students, art geeks. And it was a kindergarten in the truest sense of the world: a children's garden where I was able to sort of really come into myself as an artist, as a person, sexuality issues - like, all of this became something where there was a firming-up and a knowing that went on.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Children, School

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Running, Art, School

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?

  Kehinde Wiley

  Beautiful, Art, Block

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Art, Light, World

  "'I try to create a place of disorientation' - interview with Kehinde Wiley". Interview With Anna Savitskaya, artdependence.com. February 16, 2015.

• 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

  Art, School, San Francisco

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I think that once you're able to sort of get in line with who and how you relate to the world, you'll become closer to this index that I'm referring to. Because what you want is this card that relates to that book. What you want is this human that relates to this world, rather than having this art school society scattering that point of view somewhere in between. It becomes diffused. And that level of clarity, I think, was gained at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Book, School

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Thinking, Obsession

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Mother, Art, Educational

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I had no idea about where I was going. I had no sense of art as anything other than a problem to be fixed, you know, an itch to be scratched. I was in that studio trying my best to feel content with myself. I had, like, a stipend. I had a place to sleep. I had a studio to work in. I had nothing else to think about, you know. And that's - that was a huge luxury in New York City.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, New York, Sleep

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Art, Boys, Way

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Art, Garden, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Art, Book, Mean

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Art, Mean, Opportunity

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Art, Italian, Differences

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very sort of heroic, oversized painting of black men in a barbershop. But it was painted on the same level and with the same urgency that you would see in a grand-scale [Anthony] van Dyck or [Diego] Velazquez. The composition was classically informed; the painting technique was masterful. And it was something that really inspired me because, you know, these were images of young, black men in painting on the museum walls of one of the more sanctified and sacred institutions in Los Angeles.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Wall, Men

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Mother, Art, Years

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Art, Teaching, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Art, Book, Painting

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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