In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says..

I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognize….

When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative..

There's something really cool about being able to fly to South Africa and watch one of the most talented African footballers wearing a shoe on the fi….

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the bac….

I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects..

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out..

I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything..

What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or a….

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation..

Mel Bochner was able to give me the tools to look at those types of experiences, register them with my own, but also hold them far enough away to see….

I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the ….

Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past..

When I look back at my paintings, they don't give me a sense of where I was when I first met that guy. They don't give me a sense of what I felt like….

Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existi….

Even the hubris or the desire to go out into the world and find patterns that reflect back to yourself is so Lacanian and, like, mirrored, so as to b….

I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play..

When I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem, there was a type of freedom that existed where I didn't have to think about professors, where I didn't ha….

I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to..

Can I - do I have to be obsessed with it and proceed from that? Not always. But when I'm on top of my game, I definitely think about the way that the….

When the fat lady comes out to sing, we don't know how she feels that day. We don't know if she's suffering from a cold or is mourning a death or fal….