I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars..

I love the flexibility of saying, "Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to wor….

The ability to look at certain patterns with regards to urban fashion, with regards to swagger, with regards to cultural hegemony, with regards to th….

I noticed that the work of my non - I noticed that the work of my friends who were white and male, specifically, existed in a type of freedom that wa….

That's the trouble with, I think, my - the contemporary read of my work. So many people just simply say, "These are pretty pictures of black boys." T….

I think that at its best you just have to respect each arena for what they can do well..

I feel sometimes constrained by the expectation that the work should be solely political. I try to create a type of work that is at the service of my….

I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work..

I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad..

So sometimes you have to play your hand and sort of push in a direction. And I think that masculinity is the driving point for a lot of the way that ….

I think that I'm increasingly aware of the fact that in order to work towards any statement that's radically global or universal, you have to start i….

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder..

When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would s….

I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of cla….

In America, there's this type of expectation of just-add-water celebrity, this type of, "Of course you found me; we're all going to be famous for 15 ….

There is a political and racial context behind everything that I do. Not always because I design it that way, or because I want it that way, but rath….

I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives..

I love being a portraitist..

My peers at the time: you know, young black kids from off the streets of Harlem, having these conversations with me in my small, dirty little studio ….

There's a team of filmmakers who follow me in the streets when I'm finding these models, to give me a sense of legitimacy to a casual stranger. This ….

Is it the responsibility of the colored artist or the ethnic artist to create works that are designed to exist in opposition to a certain political s….