Kehinde Wiley Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• Feudal Europe is over, but it found its way into film culture. It found its way into postmodern painting culture, and we're all here talking about it today. It still lives. I don't believe in ghosts, but these are contemporary ghosts.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Believe, Talking, Europe

  Source: www.artpractical.com

  4 Copy quote

• My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Practice, Want

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Color, Expectations, Use

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Who I Am, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Father, Texas

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• My paintings at their best take that vocabulary and attempt to transpose that into a form that gives respect not only to the history of painting but also to those people who look and sound like me.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Vocabulary, People, Giving

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Copying, Way

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Thoughtful, Practice

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Fashion, People, Culture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Israel, People, Skins

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving, Looks, Able

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Yale, Style, Done

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Confused, Real, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• There is no pedestrian culture [in South Central Los Angeles].

  Kehinde Wiley

  Culture, Los Angeles, Pedestrians

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• My peers at the time: you know, young black kids from off the streets of Harlem, having these conversations with me in my small, dirty little studio up in Harlem.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Dirty, Kids, Black

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• Is it the responsibility of the colored artist or the ethnic artist to create works that are designed to exist in opposition to a certain political structure?

  Kehinde Wiley

  Responsibility, Artist, Political

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Years, Political

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Father, Age

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• There was no image of the other biological half of myself. And as an artists, as a - as an - as a portraitist, the look of who you are was radically important to me.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Important, Looks

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Crazy, Garden

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, School, Class

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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