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.

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

light world art

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

artist country people

I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

Kehinde Wiley

important grain thinking

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

design fighting keys

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

Kehinde Wiley

artist believe thinking

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

ethnicity arms artist

All art is self-portraiture.

Kehinde Wiley

portraiture self art

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

Kehinde Wiley

painting race class

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.

Kehinde Wiley

portraiture historical games

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.

Kehinde Wiley

artist father past

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

doe play past

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.

Kehinde Wiley

dna needs thinking

So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.

Kehinde Wiley

differences wife careers

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

Kehinde Wiley

analyzing narrative becoming

Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

Kehinde Wiley

powerful class past

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

political expectations trying

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

anxiety perfection thinking

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

Kehinde Wiley

beholder eye 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

girl museums art

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

desire museums thinking