There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.

I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.

Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.

There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings.

I think one of the things that I took from Mel [Bochner] specifically was his ability to look at oneself and one's relationship to the history of art and the practice of art at arm's length, the ability to sort of clinically and coldly remove oneself from the picture and to see it simply as a set of rules, habits, systems, moving parts.