One of my primary interests as an artist, as a painter,
has always been to show things that are rarely shown.
To reveal things that are hidden.
To see the unseen.
I determined early in my development
as an artist that what was at stake was more than just being able
to make a few works and sell a few pictures
in the moment. That there was something
much more worth the effort to try and achieve
and that was a kind of a position in, and a relationship to history.
If you're looking at Rembrandt, you're looking at Leonardo, you're looking at all these—
all of the figures in those paintings are white.
And for a long time that doesn’t matter, because those artists are who they are,
and the work is magnificent with those figures.
But when you want to do representation yourself,
you have to come up against the notion
that figures that look
like you are not represented
in the pantheon of great painting, except as peripheral.
They're not central to
the representational strategy of those artists.
And so for me, as an African American artist,
I want to see images of black people
central to the pictorial strategy of the work.
And not just occasionally,
I want to see them all the time.
The group of paintings called Mementos
had to do initially with a requiem for the 1960s.
The decade of the 1960s,
around the civil rights movement and the black liberation struggle.
When John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy
and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated,
a certain kind of popular commemorative souvenir
came into existence and became really ubiquitous.
So that those three figures came to represent
all of the hopes and aspirations
of the period of the movement.
And in a sense it became like a kind of trinity,
like a religious trinity around the 1960s.
There was a banner that had the phrase “We mourn our loss”
printed on it.
It was a felt banner with the image of Martin Luther King
and John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy on it.
And so you started seeing this kind of thing all over.
And when I was growing up in the 1960s, I saw it everywhere.
And you could hardly go into a home
and not find some manifestation of that souvenir.
It started to look like kitsch and commemoration sort of went hand in hand.
And so what I tried to do with those paintings
was to first extend the pantheon of people
who were recognized as having contributed significantly to the 1960s
beyond the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King.
But to include a whole host of other people who died in that period.
Those people, though, are the unsung, largely unsung people.
They didn't—well they didn't get the same level of popular
commemorative souvenir that the Kennedys and Martin Luther King did.
And so I was trying to redress the lack of recognition
that they got by putting them, including them in the pantheon of people
whose contributions to the decade was meaningful as well.
And so that's what
I've always strove to do with my work, is to make work that
at once acknowledged a debt to the work that had already been made,
and at the same time, try to extend
the dialog, the discourse in terms of representation in particular,
so that it included and incorporated images of blackness that operated
at the same level and with the same kind of power and sophistication.
That's what I've been trying to do.