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

I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful...and powerful. What I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim the image of blackness as an emblem of power.

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.

Comics also led a lot of young people to science fiction.

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.

I don't see those paintings as abstractions, especially because they are emblems of the inkblot. They aren't smashed together; they are constructed shape-by-shape, layer-by-layer, like any other picture.

Before people outside of the Western European tradition started asking to be in there, the people who were accumulating objects for the museum were perfectly satisfied with the narrative they were constructing.