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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For far too long, victims' rights have been discussed only in the context of sentencing. Sentencing is very important, but the debate obscures something much more fundamental: most victims have so little faith in our criminal justice system that they do not access it at all.

Rights compliance helps effective outcomes, it does not hinder them. That should come as no surprise because the 'human rights' in the Human Rights Act are the rights adopted in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war, and are designed to protect all of us from oppression.

I think most people accept that it is necessary to have some surveillance in a democratic society. I think most people accept that it's important to have limits and clear safeguards on that.

Labour's priorities are clear: jobs and the economy must come first; not party interests or ideological fantasies.

I always say, it's better to be asked why you're leaving, rather than when you're leaving.

Britain outside the E.U. would be less able to respond with the speed and strength we need to tackle complex and growing cross-border threats to all our communities.

You don't win elections by telling people what you're against. We're very good at listing things we don't much like about what the Tories are doing. But you win elections by telling them what you're for, what you're going to change, what's going to be better.

If you lose your job because there has been an influx of labour from another country, that is a legitimate cause for concern.

Strip away the factual misinformation repeatedly peddled about the Human Rights Act and almost everyone acknowledges that it works well in practice. Police up and down the country have found the Human Rights Act a much clearer and firmer basis for practical policing than the common law ever was.

Human rights only have meaning if they are universal.

You can't meet Labour's tests by failing to provide answers.

For some people, work is the only safe haven from abuse. So all employers in businesses big and small, whether in the public or private sector, should be encouraged to create safe spaces at work where staff suffering domestic abuse can talk to an appropriately qualified person who can provide advice and offer support.

In a democracy there will always be a tension between security and privacy.

There is a world of difference between not disclosing fine detail and relying on broad and generalised assertions. The first may be understandable; the second is not acceptable.

The nature of the final Brexit deal really matters. It is, as I have said before, the battle of our times.

Just when we need a strong government, what do we see? Division. Chaos. And failure. No credible plan for Brexit, no solution to prevent a hard border in Ireland and no majority in Parliament for the Chequers proposals.