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" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "

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

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

" 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. "

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" I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down. "

" The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking. "

" I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture. "

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

" My love affair with painting is bittersweet. "

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

" 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. "

" I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work. "

" 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. "

" In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle. "

" I'm like a gypsy. I've got a place in Beijing, a place in New York, a place in west Africa; I'm working on a place in Colombia. I like the fact that painting is portable - and I've wanted my entire life to be able to see the world, to respond to it, and make that my life's work. "

" 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. "

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

" When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy. "

" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative. "

" 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. "

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