When I was in my early twenties I was doing tenant organizing - rent strikes, specifically - in my building. I think that was how I started doing poster art. It was something very concrete.

If I do a picture, I want the audience to be the people I was just packed against on the subway or on the street, walking on Fourteenth Street. I don't want it to be some narrow public that I myself feel alienated from.

The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are.

In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

I don't even believe in magic, or ghosts or anything like that, and yet in a city like New York, on the subway, I definitely see ghosts and art seems to have some magical properties.

The trick is not to look back, but keep on expressing where I'm at now. It's challenging to create something new, so it's crucial to dwell in the present moment.

Doing art that has a happy ending, that doesn't seem really corny, is extremely difficult to pull off convincingly.