What I'm slowly realizing is that I believe that most of us felt that we could relax a little bit after November 2, 2008, because of the progress and the spirit that it took to get Barack Obama in The White House. And what we didn't realize, is that was really the beginning. That was really the beginning of the struggle and not the end of a struggle, to come from colonial times through slavery, through the Jim Crowe Laws, through the civil rights period to The White House as, like a point A/point B journey. Point B of course being the end.

Just because the laws were changed doesn't mean that the attitudes have changed.

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

It's easy for me to say, "Oh yeah, that's the self-saboteur move that most artists pull whenever they're afraid."

I want to be as healthy as I can be so I can make it past 50; make it past 60 and make it past 70.

Half the time, my job is basically to talk people off the ledge. It's more psychological than just me picking up some sticks and counting, "1, 2, 3, 4."

I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic.