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" I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama. "

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" Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope. "

" My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic. "

" I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. "

" In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination. "

" Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time. "

" My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world. "

" There's something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That's the magic of painting. "

" I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing! "

" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "

" It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence. "

" This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures. "

" There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible. "

" I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated - I'm not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization - what I'm trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don't really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily. "

" The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside. "

" I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there. "

" I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do. "

" My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria. "

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" Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends. "

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" The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States - quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world - means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids but every population group in this nation. "

" During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids. "

" Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible. "

" Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock every day, is what gave me this sensibility and drove me to explore my fascination with art. "

" When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers. "