I am primarily an oil painter and a studio painter, so originally I was going to do an oil painting.

Men who are offenders of street harassment and women who experience street harassment can walk by and feel something about it, because it's out there in the environment where the harassment actually happens. So it's a lot more powerful than an oil painting that's stuck in a gallery or under my bed or in my studio where only a couple of eyes are going to see it, as opposed to it being in an environment where it could possibly effect a change.

I'm a woman of color. I've lived in black neighborhoods all of my life, and most of the time I get hit on in my neighborhood - and mostly by black men. And so I wanted to have my specific experience and my perspective on street harassment out there.

I feel like we're looked at as either completely nonsexual characters or overly sexual characters, and I feel like that affects how we're treated in the public space by men. I believe that women of color experience street harassment in a very hyper way. So I wanted to draw these women in their very normal, regular states and put those images out there in the public for people to see, instead of these other, very sexualized, images of women.

Stop telling women to smile.

In Boston, a couple of the women were students and they mentioned how Boston has a huge student population, and that's specific to their experiences of street harassment. They feel like the men were a lot more aggressive, particularly when it comes to social outings and things like that.

Specifically for black women, our images and our bodies in the media and in history have been so hypersexualized.