Everyone is fascinated by looking at another human being. There's something very intimate about the ways that people assume that by looking at certain parts of the portrait, they'll be able to understand who these people are, where they come from and why they happen to be in this museum today. In my work, I try to slow down and see individuals. I'm standing on the shoulders of all of those artists who came before me, but here there's a space for a new way of seeing black and brown bodies all over the world. A new republic is an exhibition that allows for every single moment within my career, all of the different acts, all of the different bodies of work to be seen. What you get is a diversity of experiences, a picture of what black American kids are up to, a picture of what the global story is with regards to how young people adorn themselves and celebrate and fall in love. It's really interesting to be able to look through the history of some of the great portraits and to say, what is it about the trappings of empire and power that we can use in the 21st century? What does it look like to be graceful? What does it look like to be proud, noble? How do you look a young black man in American society? It's a very important question, especially at this moment in our culture. The way in which the body is seen has a lot to do with light. How does the artist choose to allow light to flow across the body? For the last 10 years, I've been obsessed with stained glass. What I wanted to do was to create a body of work in which empathy and the language of the religious and the rapturous all collided into one space. Black women have always been at the core of my thinking around portraiture. You see so many portraits where the male figure stands dominant to the forefront of the painting and women and children and land are seen in equal measure as possessions. In my own work, the women are strident, they take the front. But there's also a sense of mystery. We don't really know who these women are. Bound is a sculptural project that looks at the presence of black women. All of those women that raised me, the graceful women who have been in my life over the years. But also the ways in which black American women adorn themselves, it's both the type of communication act and armor. And hair is principle within that. You see hair going outside of itself becoming so fabulous, so extraordinarily large that it folds in under its own weight. It's beauty that becomes decay. It's a place in which the imagination starts to happen. The Brooklyn Museum is extraordinarily important for me. I remember having my first exhibition here. Being able to celebrate this moment in a place like Brooklyn where so many of the people who are in these paintings come from is an incredible blessing. In some sense, what I'm trying to do is to come to terms with the ways in which black American culture has been beamed out into the rest of the world. And that is a type of new republic.