I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.

There's something really cool about being able to fly to South Africa and watch one of the most talented African footballers wearing a shoe on the field.

I love the of dealing with the homoerotic versus the idea of dealing with certain tropes with regards to black masculinity in the world, propensity towards sports, antisocial behavior, hypersexuality - all of these sort of non-truths that I don't exist in but that I see as being fixed in the world's imagination.

There is no pedestrian culture [in South Central Los Angeles].

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.

I love being a portraitist.

Like, the smells and the sights and the sounds. As an artist, you want to sort of be able to engage that and get that down in some way. This is - this is a type of familiarity but a type of radical difference at the same time.