” I’ve jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there’s a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer – my version of him – that’s in his collection. “
” Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. “
” Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it’s an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time. “
” The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There’s a dissonance between inside and outside. “
” 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. “
” 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. “
All 6 Kehinde Wiley Quotes about Black in picture
Topics: Black quotes