He's a great - he's a great professor. He retired recently, but.But Peter Halley as well.
You have to bring books to explain your work.
I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.
I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.
Feudal Europe is over, but it found its way into film culture. It found its way into postmodern painting culture, and we're all here talking about it today. It still lives. I don't believe in ghosts, but these are contemporary ghosts.
I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.
I think that at its best, painting can be an act of juggling perceptions, a hall of mirrors. And it can be a bit confusing and scattering. But as the artist, as the man behind the velvet rope who controls the smoke and the mirrors and the way that things move in the painted space, what I want to do is to try my best to be a good witness.
My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.
What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.
So much of the hubris that surrounded conceptual art in the 1950s through '70s was that it had this arrogant presupposition that pointing in and of itself was a creative act. It never rigorously politically and socially analyzed the fact that the luxury to point is something that so many people throughout the world don't have.
It never really understood its own situational luxury. And I think that by and large the privilege of being Kehinde Wiley in the 21st century, making these high-priced luxury goods, traveling the world, pointing at these people, behooves me to have a point of view and to say something about it.
For me, I wanted to create something that's much more driven by a type of selfishness, a type of decadence.
Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about.
What's interesting about my project recently is that I'm going out into broader global spaces but then isolating at the same time - sort of pushing out but then pulling in.
The expectations of the viewer are what you're asking about. And the expectations of the viewer are manifold. However, they are very fixed, given who I am in the world. People have certain expectations of me as an artist.
I use those expectations as a color on my palette, a certain temperature in the room. You can use those expectations for the great punchline, but also for a great painting, in society.
I think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.
Mel [Bochner] sets a very high standard. He expects only the best and most thoughtful and rigorous examinations, not only of the history of art but your own practice.
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.
I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think one of the things that I took from Mel [Bochner] specifically was his ability to look at oneself and one's relationship to the history of art and the practice of art at arm's length, the ability to sort of clinically and coldly remove oneself from the picture and to see it simply as a set of rules, habits, systems, moving parts.
