What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or allows to consider the world in a slightly different way.
All art is self-portraiture.
I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.
That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.
It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.
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.
If I have the same plan to go into the streets, find random strangers, use art-historical referent from their - from the specific location, to use decorative patterns from this location, that's a rule. That's a set of patterns that you can apply to all societies. But what gives rise or what comes out of each experiment is so radically different.
I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?
I had no idea about where I was going. I had no sense of art as anything other than a problem to be fixed, you know, an itch to be scratched. I was in that studio trying my best to feel content with myself. I had, like, a stipend. I had a place to sleep. I had a studio to work in. I had nothing else to think about, you know. And that's - that was a huge luxury in New York City.
I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.
There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.
One of my most strong memories was studying with Mel Bochner, one of the, I think, high water marks of American conceptual art.
I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.
I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.
So much of the hubris that surrounded conceptual art in the 1950s through '70s was that it had this arrogant presupposition that pointing in and of itself was a creative act. It never rigorously politically and socially analyzed the fact that the luxury to point is something that so many people throughout the world don't have.
Mel [Bochner] sets a very high standard. He expects only the best and most thoughtful and rigorous examinations, not only of the history of art but your own practice.
I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.
I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very sort of heroic, oversized painting of black men in a barbershop. But it was painted on the same level and with the same urgency that you would see in a grand-scale [Anthony] van Dyck or [Diego] Velazquez. The composition was classically informed; the painting technique was masterful. And it was something that really inspired me because, you know, these were images of young, black men in painting on the museum walls of one of the more sanctified and sacred institutions in Los Angeles.
Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.
I think one of the things that I took from Mel [Bochner] specifically was his ability to look at oneself and one's relationship to the history of art and the practice of art at arm's length, the ability to sort of clinically and coldly remove oneself from the picture and to see it simply as a set of rules, habits, systems, moving parts.
In high school I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. And this is like Fame. It's like that sort of prototypical, dancers in the hallway, theater students, musical students, art geeks. And it was a kindergarten in the truest sense of the world: a children's garden where I was able to sort of really come into myself as an artist, as a person, sexuality issues - like, all of this became something where there was a firming-up and a knowing that went on.
I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.
After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.
Much like teaching art to young art students age 10 to 15 or so on, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces, essential components. You have to - you know, at this point I'm so used to operating within given assumptions about art. But when you're explaining art to art students or people who are new to this experience, you have to really go back to the fundamentals.
