My mother decided that the school across the street from our house, the public school, was terrible and so in first grade she started to send me to private school on scholarship. She called around and found the school that would give her the most scholarship money. Unbeknownst to her, it was one of the most liberal schools in New York and so lots of classes about the civil rights movement and labor history. Not a lot of classes about English grammar and mathematics, but in some ways that was a perfect environment for me to think about art as a career because there were other people around who encouraged that. In my work I'm always interested in appearance and disappearance. I'm interested in these moments particularly around African-American history where we feel the need as a people to assert our presence in a place like the United States by marching on the Mall in Washington, D.C., for example, to assert our presence in a country that we've been in from the beginning or even we've been in before there was a country called America, the United States. I guess I think of material in a couple of different ways. One is, stuff like paint as material, but I think also language is a material. Autobiography is a material, you know, experience is a material. The painting behind me, for example, uses oil stick which is just sort of an oily crayon, basically and then thrown on top of that oil stick while it's still wet is coal dust. The text is from James Baldwin's essay, "Stranger in the Village," and I think there was a correspondence between that coal dust, which is a sort of leftover product from coal processing. It looks like a shiny black gravel and Baldwin's words. Like Baldwin says that it is at the margins of the society where you see the society most clearly. He's interested in these sort of marginal places. He's interested in how the, what he calls the disesteemed, see the society. You know, it elevates itself through that use but it also does this funny thing to Baldwin's text. It makes it harder to read. so I'm making the reading of Baldwin's words difficult because it's a parallel to the difficulty of the subject matter that Baldwin's trying to address and so that struggle the viewer has with this dense materialized text that I'm using is about the struggle of trying to understand what it means for Baldwin to be a black man in American society or his relationship to European culture or his relationship to the civil rights movement as, as an exile that he's in France writing about it, but he's not there. I think difficulty for me or opacity is a, is in some ways a political stance. During the era of high multiculturalism, you know. Where there were opportunities to show your work, but in some ways, only if that work showed a kind of visible difference. That one's racial identity, racial identity, sexual identity was kind of up front. And I think my work in some ways, so as a reaction to that, you know, it's not figurative. It presents texts but it presents texts that are difficult to read. When I was young I wanted to be de Kooning and probably Twombly and that's because I didn't know who Jack Whitten was because nobody was teaching me about him in my art history classes. So I think we have to get over this notion of the canon because the canon is not this fixed thing that we bang the doors down and enter. I think we're over that. Maybe we need to start talking about canons, you know, or maybe we need to realize that this idea of the canon, like anything else, is limited and that it needs to be expanded and the gatekeepers of what we perceive to be the canon need to be replaced and they do get replaced. And so maybe it's not quite a useful concept anymore. So no, I don't think I'm reacting against the canon or trying to figure my place in it, I'm just trying to make my work, but I'm also trying to make my work you know, sort of be there in a hundred years when the issues that we're talking about now have been resolved, if that's even possible. I want my work to still be there and still speak
