Artist Statement

A lot of my work in Chicago had humor in it. When I moved to New York, honestly, my concerns were just different. But it was really important to my development as an artist to go through those steps and to come out in a very different place from where I began.

Now I deal with more formal concerns of abstraction, even in works like the branded wood pieces, which also relate to critical and conceptual notions. Form is where I really started as an artist, before my work became involved with other concerns. I’ve gone back to issues around how you make decisions as an artist, as well as the materials and tools that you use to make those decisions.

Regardless of what you make, in all likelihood some sort of cultural experience is projected onto the work. And I really want to take some ownership of that, to be able to shape the conversation in a way that deals with my experience, in my time, while still participating with the other decisions and issues you confront as an artist.

I do see a line that I fit into. I might look at Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, and see how that leads to Norman Lewis and then Martin Puryear, and see how that gives birth to David Hammons and then Mark Bradford and then how an artist like me fits in.

I have left out a lot of people in that list—a tremendous number of people in the early ‘90s, there was a lot of work that explored and reexamined a narrative that had been somewhat abandoned by the abstract painters. I am talking about black female photographers like Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as Glenn Ligon after them. It all starts to twist and turn, to become a complex of both history and contemporary art practice.

from an interview by Christopher Stackhouse originally published in Art in America, April 2012, pp.106-113. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC.

… there was a period when I had a negative reaction to (the “post-black” label). For years I think I perceived blackness in arts as this ghettoized space and a limitation, but I don’t anymore. I don’t feel my conversation is limited by being lumped in with other artists who have similar things to say. I am conscious of racism and I don’t want to ignore the typical black subjects in art—urbanity, poverty. But that’s not my exclusive concern, either. I think a lot of young black people grow up viewing being black as a monolithic experience, that you are supposed to behave a certain way. When I lived in Chicago, living up to certain black standards and expectations was my battle—how do I and who I am fit into that conversation? Certainly a lot of my autobiographical pieces are about that, more about addressing a black audience and inner-community concerns than teaching a white audience that black people have different hair or whatever.

Anyway … I came to terms with the fact my conversation will get hijacked! No matter what I do, I know I would be obligated to comment on the black experience and if I don’t offer that, it would be offered for me. So, I could let that conversation be hijacked or I could make peace with that hijacking and do it on my terms. For me, at this moment, that means my work is about opportunity and class. But at least it’s what I want to talk about. (Artist) Kara Walker has a great line about being black and making art that I never forget. She said if a black artist paints smiley faces and flowers, someone always asks “Why is she so angry?” from the Chicago Tribune (April 19, 2012)

In my work, I have always been conscious of producing a conversation that is true to my life experience. I have, in the past, been wary of work by artists that concentrates its attention completely on a history that shows black Americans as victims.

This approach is not completely without merit, since...