The moment you introduce difference into a museum, then the privileged space is contested, and under the most ideal circumstances what all artists want is the chance to be competitive. That's what I think the museum is supposed to be.

I still make paintings and use the figure; it's hard to do and hard to succeed. On some levels, because I am working with black figures and black pigment, it's even harder because I have to be more responsible for the image. I try to be really careful about the presence the figure projects.

No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be messy in there.

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

Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

In some ways you still have to buy your freedom, but that's because you live in a social structure that's organized around capital, and capital does equate with a certain kind of freedom, especially if you can start to generate capital on your own.

In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.