When I'm painting and in the zone, it's difficult for me to stop. It can take me half a day to get into that space, and once I do, I only talk to a certain few people who won't disrupt it. Home to sleep and back at it, nothing else outside of getting food. Everything else is an annoyance getting in my way.
I've forgotten a lot of things. I've forgotten how to play the piano and how to speak Arabic, though I studied it for two years.
Why can't I make up my own characters and paint the people I want to see in the world? I'm depicting the many people who existed in history but whose presence was never documented.
Art was not a thing for my family and is still not a thing for my family. My family will not go to a museum unless I say we have to go there. That's why I really feel like it was something I was supposed to do because there was no directive that pushed me in that direction.
A lot of the artists that people equate my work to, I didn't find out about until after graduate school.
Art class was my safe haven.
I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.
Signing autographs is weird. I'm an introvert, so it's been a strain in that way.
Michelle Obama is extraordinary, but she is also the kind of woman that exists in a way that is - she's a hundred percent relatable to all kinds of people, all genders all around the world.
When people ask me about color in my work, I tend to say that it came from spending a lot of time in Panama.
I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.
I blacked out in a Rite Aid. The doctor told me my heart function was at 5 percent. I spent two months in the hospital waiting to have a transplant. For me, that was the end of the world.
In sociology, they call it 'code switching.' I can feel just as comfortable in a room full of people who don't look like me because I understand the social cues of class and race.
Imagination allows you to bend the rules of the temporal world.
I was at all-white schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I wanted to feel what it was like just to be me and not, like, Black Amy.
