Kehinde Wiley

My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you're looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken.

Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.

The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it.

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

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.

By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.

The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.

What you have in my work is one person's path as he travels through the world, and there is no limitation of what is conceivable.

I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.

I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.