A Quote by Kehinde Wiley

I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem [New York, NY]. I wanted to know what that was about. I would actually pull people from off of the streets and ask them to come to my studio.
My peers at the time: you know, young black kids from off the streets of Harlem, having these conversations with me in my small, dirty little studio up in Harlem.
The first painting I remember selling was 'Panthera.' I made it while I was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the museum actually purchased it directly from me.
When I decided to go to art school, it wasn't necessarily something I thought I needed. No one talked about graduate school when I was an undergrad. I went on to a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and that transition from Yale to the Studio Museum, that was the real beginning of my professional career.
In the Studio Museum in Harlem, when I was dealing with that community and dealing with my peers in the streets, it allowed for me to get outside of Yale, to get outside of art-speak, and to really think about art as a material practice that has very useful and pragmatic material precedent.
Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'
I got Sonny up to Harlem, and we started street playin' in New York. We did that for three or four years and survived. We brought it back to the streets again.
I especially like Duke Ellington jazz, which is a little more... I lived in New York for a while. I lived in Harlem for a bit, and I just fell in love with the idea of that era of New York, that jazz era, especially jazz in Harlem.
Harlem is really a melting pot for a lot of different people. When you look at Harlem - and I lived there almost five years - most of the people who live in Harlem are transplants. They migrate to Harlem from another place.
People don't really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won't give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken.
When I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem, there was a type of freedom that existed where I didn't have to think about professors, where I didn't have to think about much of anything other than my own practice.
When you look at Harlem - and I lived there almost five years - most of the people who live in Harlem are transplants. They migrate to Harlem from another place. A lot of them are from the south, so they bring those southern influences with them.
Earlier I had been in New York, which was my first time to New York, and I got booked in the Baby Grand up in Harlem there. I was booked there for a week; they kept me there for about a month. That's where Doc Pomus and myself became very close friends and start running together around town and what not.
People don't really know, but I went to Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York.
Sara Blair's Harlem Crossroads is an important addition to the body of literature that currently exists about Harlem. It brilliantly illuminates the complex relationship between photographic representation and race, and adds new insight into the ways in which this one black community has figured in both the critical and public imaginations. Harlem Crossroads is a tour de force.
I never walked the streets of New York hoping to be a musical comedy star. For one thing, they would have thought I was too tall, because l was five feet eight and a half, and they were all little bitty things running around in the studio at that time.
I was one of the first post-studio artists. I used to do my works in the streets. I used to find them in the streets, and I used to leave them in the streets.
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