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

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

" For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing. "

" What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body. "

" Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement. "

" What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture. "

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

" 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. "

" I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized. "

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

" Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends. "

" 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'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. "

" It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you're a kid. "

" I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets. "

" Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic. "

" If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw. "

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

" 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. "

" My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint. "

" I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial. "

" Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance. "

" There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards. "

" In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be. "

" I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "

" My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys. "

Black And White

" Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture. "

" There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value. "

" What you have in my work is one person's path as he travels through the world, and there is no limitation of what is conceivable. "

" If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world. "

" 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. "