What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.
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.
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.
My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing - communication devices. I grew up between my father's laboratory and my mother's library.