I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!
Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.
The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that.
Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.
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.
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.
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 think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.
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.
The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.
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 thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.
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.
What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
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 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.
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.
I've fished everywhere I've traveled.
We all look at the same object in different ways.
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.
