Occupation: Painter Birth: 1977
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..
I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's….
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….
Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that paintin….
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 ….
What's interesting about young black American artists within the twentieth century, and increasingly within the twenty-first as well, is that there's….
I actually studied cooking and, like, was thinking about becoming a chef..
Just physically, if you looked at the house that I grew up in, my mother created this greenhouse. And surrounded the entire property. And there was, ….
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 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….
Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fru….
I think it's really useful to create parameters. The term you use can be forwarded into something more like a grid, a rubric, a system that you apply….
What's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice,….
How does the artist function as poet-slash-witness-slash-trickster?.
Most people say, "Hell, no. I don't know who you are. This scares me. Like, I'm not interested in this."Another way of looking at these paintings is,….
And as a young black man, a lot of my professors would really think that it was useful to see the work of politically oriented, positivistic, leftist….
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….
Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British….
I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting..
I had no idea about where I was going. I had no sense of art as anything other than a problem to be fixed, you know, an itch to be scratched. I was i….
In high school I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. And this is like Fame. It's like that sort of prototypical, dancers in the ….