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1. As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win — or just not be so sad!
2. I’ve seen people glaze over when they’re confronted with racism, and there’s nothing more, you know, damning and demeaning to having any kind of ideology than people just walking the walk and saying what they’re supposed to say and nodding, and nobody feels anything.
3. I know that in my family there are histories of violence that are internal family things and that are oftentimes dealt with internally. By internally, I mean inside the family group, but also partly inside ourselves. You know, self-hatred and hostility and rage and this cycle that won’t break.
4. I took a political stance early on, but I don’t think my work is overtly political. I respond to events.
5. I have no interest in making a work that doesn’t elicit a feeling.
6. Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not.
7. A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected… that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.
8. I don’t know how much I believe in redemptive stories, even though people want them and strive for them.
9. Humor’s always been the problem of my work, hasn’t it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing.
10. The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.
11. I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.
12. I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things — genre paintings, historical paintings — the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society.
13. To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what’s not working and challenge it. You riff on things.
14. I’m a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.
15. I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t really know what it was I wanted to say.
16. I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, ‘She’s on our side.’ These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn’t have to deal with.
17. Once you open up the Pandora’s box of race and gender… you’re never done.
18. There was a manifesto in the late ‘60s/early ’70s, and it basically laid out what ‘black art’ was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules — I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.
19. I don’t think that my work is very moralistic — at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don’t think visual work operates like that.
20. The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us — viewer and maker — in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.