American - Artist | 1977 -
The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.
Kehinde Wiley
IdentityPerformanceBlackAmerican
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.
WorkMenBlackEndAmericanLook
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.
CommunitySocietyChoicesThinkOwn
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.
WalkManPeopleBlackAmericanLook
One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.
MeMeasureNeverKnowingUpThings
I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.
TimePracticeThinkArtistSomething
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.
WorkArtImaginationPeoplePlay
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.
MotherChildMeWorldLanguageYou
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.
MenPoliceBlackKnowYoungAfraid
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.
WorkServiceMatterUpPaintSit
I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.
I AmThinkingEvolutionWithinPaint
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.
WorkFutureValueSaidComplexYour
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Kehinde Wiley quotes