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" It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer. "

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" The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at. "

" I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me. "

" 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. "

" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "

" Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form. "

" 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. "

" It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting. "

" Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. "

" The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it. "

" I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art. "

" I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth. "

" 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. "

" I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties. "

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

" Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence. "

" The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you. "

" In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame. "

" At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings. "

" 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. "

" What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe. "

" My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others. "

" 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. "

" Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with. "

" The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time. "

" By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me. "

" We all look at the same object in different ways. "

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

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

" Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society. "

" Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography. "