The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.

If you're constantly being reminded of the ways in which your history and your narrative as a people were rooted in loss and decay, then you're in deep trouble. Once you make a certain kind of peace with the past, then you should be completely oriented towards speculation about the future.

I came in making choices about how I deploy aesthetics and imagery strategically. It seems to me that's the only legitimate way of making work.

If you look at the image [ Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], it treads on a kind of popular stereotypical image of the black figure, in both its flatness and slightly comic edge. To take that image as a starting point and to render it in a proto-classical medium, like egg tempera, and then use a repertoire of classical compositional devices to make the picture was a way of setting up an engagement with art history.

The first freedom is to be in possession of yourself - to own yourself, to not be subject to the will of somebody else. In a capitalist society, that means having a certain economic wherewithal so that you can do what you wish to do without having to ask permission.

Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.

Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.