My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys.
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.
Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.
I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.
I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.
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.
In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.
I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated - I'm not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization - what I'm trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don't really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily.
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked.
Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends.
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.
One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.
The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at.
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.
It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you're a kid.
Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.
You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.
I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do.
I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art.
