Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.

When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.

My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.

It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.

Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.

Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies?

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

What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture.

It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.

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.

At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking.

For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing.

Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it.

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.

When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.

The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it.

I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.

When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.

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.

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.

You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.

Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.

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.