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" Art class was my safe haven. "

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" I'm painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I'm hopefully presenting them in a way that's universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas. "

" My father wanted me to be a dentist like him, or any doctor, really. There was this attitude of, 'The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist.' "

" Art was not a thing for my family and is still not a thing for my family. My family will not go to a museum unless I say we have to go there. That's why I really feel like it was something I was supposed to do because there was no directive that pushed me in that direction. "

" The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett. "

" I paint American people, and I tell American stories through the paintings I create. "

" Signing autographs is weird. I'm an introvert, so it's been a strain in that way. "

" The people I choose as models have a quality that seems to contain the past, the present, and the future all at once. It's hard to explain. I can look at 100 people in a room but only find it in one person. "

" My mother was willing to support art as a summer program for me. She never supported it as a career decision until I won the National Gallery Portrait Competition. "

" When I found photography, I found this other kind of portraiture of black families and black people who were photographing themselves or having themselves photographed in ways they wanted to be seen. "

" I blacked out in a Rite Aid. The doctor told me my heart function was at 5 percent. I spent two months in the hospital waiting to have a transplant. For me, that was the end of the world. "

" I'm not a very verbal person. "

" To be human is to be visible. "

" I paint paintings of people. "

" Success, for me, is staying true to who you are and not deviating off a path. "

" When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I'd draw it. "

" Imagination allows you to bend the rules of the temporal world. "

" Why can't I make up my own characters and paint the people I want to see in the world? I'm depicting the many people who existed in history but whose presence was never documented. "

" I don't think anybody can create in a space where they don't feel comfortable. "

" I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe. "

" I've forgotten a lot of things. I've forgotten how to play the piano and how to speak Arabic, though I studied it for two years. "

" It's hard for me to find people to paint. There has got to be something about them that only I can see. "

" I probably shouldn't curse as much as I do. "

" I thought I was going to die when I was 39. "

" Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype. "