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Quote by Kehinde Wiley

“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.”

Quote by Kehinde Wiley

Author

Kehinde Wiley is a renowned contemporary painter known for his modern interpretations of traditional portraiture. His works typically depict portraits of African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities, blending elements of history, culture, and pop culture. Born in 1977, Wiley's work has had a profound impact on the art world. more

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

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“I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“[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.”

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