You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it

I guess I had fun doing it but it has hard memories for me.

I had this idea that I wanted to do this mixture of visions of African American women and visions of African American men. And call it 'The Men' and call it 'The Women' and show different faces of these two people.

Creativity helps us realize that we don't have to understand everything. We can enjoy something -feel it and use it- without ever fully comprehending it.

Because the mask is your face, the face is a mask, so I'm thinking of the face as a mask because of the way I see faces is coming from an African vision of the mask which is the thing that we carry around with us, it is our presentation, it's our front, it's our face.

I became a feminist because I wanted to help my daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind a good man.

I'm not presumptuous enough to feel that people are going to feel what I have in mind, so I tell a story, you know, let them read something, that doesn't change, that as I have said it, you know, so that's the way I feel about the viewer, the viewer has a mind of their own and eyes of their own and they're going to see it their way, I just hope they look.