Growing up in Chicago, there was a very particular type of home that would display the black Jesus figure. It wasn't a radical home. You wouldn't find these in a Black Panther house. There's still a strong allegiance to Christianity.

I have an investment in the signifying aspects of the material as well as an understanding of antecedent bodies of work. That informs the way I make marks and make decisions.

When I was young, I remember feeling a real thirst for opportunities around the arts, for learning about how artists function and how institutions work.

I'd begun to collect things that were lying in piles on the floor of my studio. I had run out of space, and I started to build shelves. I turned around one day and realized that that was the vehicle for carrying so many of the things that I was looking at and talking about, so they went from the walls to the works.

I believe a person who designs for the sheer passion of creativity can do so across media - it is like any other form of art.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

I'll confess right here that I secretly wish I'd have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.

Exercise your creative muscles all the time, either through classes or through other artistic avenues like painting or dancing or even gardening, staying active and being creative so that when opportunities do come up, you are in a position to take advantage of them.