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 was recently in Israel doing my work and casting for models in the streets of Haifa and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, meeting young Israelis and Palestinians and Falasha, Ethiopian Jews who had migrated to Israel in the '70s. They're obsessed with Bob Marley. They're obsessed with Kanye West. They're obsessed with resistance culture, people who find that they're not necessarily comfortable in their own personal and national skin.

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.

I'm fully capable of multitasking certain conceptual concerns within the work.

At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.

If I were making paintings of a bowl of fruit it would still be viewed through some sort of political lens, because the viewer wants to create a type of narrative around the political theme when they look at work depicting black and brown models.