By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.

Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been on class war theme. It's been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are. They may have guns and pepper spray and helicopters and F16s and the whole U.S. military on their side, but when it comes down to it, we still have the numbers.

By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.

Artists always live in the cracks anyway, whatever culture they're in. They're usually accustomed to not having much money, to kind of roughing it.

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.

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