I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.

What's interesting about young black American artists within the twentieth century, and increasingly within the twenty-first as well, is that there's this expectation of a political corrective that demands that the artist fixes the ills of the world.

I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.

The ability to look at certain patterns with regards to urban fashion, with regards to swagger, with regards to cultural hegemony, with regards to the ways in which young people look at resistance culture as a pattern that should be mimicked and admired.

My mother's from Texas. Small town outside of Waco called Downsville. And my father's from Nigeria. And so I guess I'm properly African-American.

Is it the responsibility of the colored artist or the ethnic artist to create works that are designed to exist in opposition to a certain political structure?

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.