Tending to ourselves, we tend the world. Tending the world, we tend ourselves.
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.
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.
I think we need to remember. . . that a lot of energy was put into changing things to get us to the point where we are now. But being where we are now doesn't mean that we don't have to put in the same kind of energy to get us to a place where we ought to be.
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.
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.
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.
What we have to continue to remind ourselves is that violence is a choice.
I have said repeatedly that in this country we track library books better than we do sex offenders.
OK, boss, I don't mind shuffling, but I won't scratch my head.
I was unrecognizable to myself; I saw my reflection in a window; I didn't know my own face.