This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I’m interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures. Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking. Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
It’s so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence. Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall… It strengthened me on a cellular level. Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw. Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there. Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies? Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
What’s interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don’t necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it’s down the street or on the other side of the globe. Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
In the end, what I’m trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination. Kehinde Wiley Read Quote
