Without providing any definite answers, I think my work raises questions about attitudes towards race and gender. I think it operates on different levels and reflects different racial and political experiences - but I don't think my pieces are limited by that. I hope they transcend and go beyond that, and provide a space for illusion and fantasy. They reflect a desire to present myself in various ways to counter the image that has been imposed on me. Race is inevitable in South Africa.

There have been a lot of things in ... the Black experience for which there are no terms, certainly not in English at this moment. There are a lot of aspects of consciousness for which there is no vocabulary, no structure in the English language which would allow people to validate that experience through language. I'm trying to find a way to do that....I'm trying to break open and get at the bones, deal with symbols as though they were atoms. I'm trying to find out not only how a word gains meaning, but how a word gains power."

I think I’m somewhat defined by my race for sure, and I’m good with that and I actually want that to be a part. I think that should be fodder for our work — we should use all aspects of ourselves. I’m always trying to find a place where that’s actually an impact on what I’m doing as opposed to going, “Well, we’re all just people and we’re the same.”

Through my artwork and films, I hope to open audiences up to a new dialogue between the continents of Africa and America; one that incorporates more than just stereotypes, but includes both conventionalized and un-conventionalized discourses of race in its service. By creating complex contradictions, I hope that new meaning can emerge and be deposited into the universal consciousness. If I can do this by creating an experience for the audience that enables them to experience what it is like to find oneself, while being foreign in a community, then perhaps I can help that new meaning come to light.

Whether we look at race as a fixed notion or culturally constructed concept it is very real. Race itself is an invention, a creation. Many people feel race is something that’s fixed, rigid and doesn’t have variances. By looking at Afro-Latinos, you kind of get a better sense of how fluid race has been. People have constructed it in different ways depending on conditions and circumstances.

Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.

I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels: political freedom, freedom to think and to feel. As an African American living in the United States, obviously issues like segregation laws, the civil rights movement in the 1960s or South Africa have been on my mind when I have dealt with the concept of freedom. But freedom also relates to my career as an artist: freedom of mind, thought and imagination. On the artistic level, freedom was a significant principle in the earlier art movements, such as Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism. More recently, public art focuses on the issue of universal freedom.

I truly believe that art (and I use this term loosely here to refer to all forms of creative expression) provides an incredible opportunity for people to bring their full selves to their activism. We are not one-dimensional beings and thus we are affected and influenced by all of the things around us. I see art as an opportunity to take some of the very complex concepts and issues that we face on a daily basis and break them down in ways that are more palatable and easily digestible by young people.

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity. Freedom of expression, for me, consists in moving within a measured range that I assign to each of my undertakings. How instructive it is to remember Leonardo da Vinci's counsel that "strength is born of constraint and dies from freedom."

The participants of the project are from different generations and art movements: from fine aestheticism to popular brutalism. Artist even chose types of paper to work on. This freedom to express themselves gave artists a possibility to create their subjective spaces inside the concept that works as the objective reality of the project plotted out by Alexey Parygin.

Negro art contains more ideas than Greek art. Its strange inventiveness of form is astonishing, and its imagination and extraordinary sense of decoration are difficult to explain. We dare not take such liberties; but the Negroes have succeeded. We are too much the subjects of our own past..

I’ve found that there’s this idea of what a black experience is, and because I write what’s outside of what’s been allowed to be on stage, there’s a questioning of authenticity, which is beyond maddening. For a white producer, executive, artistic director [etc.] to tell me that my work isn’t black enough… I’m losing my mind…

I wish we had more nuanced, complex conversations about books. Why can’t we speak in expansive terms about genre and aesthetics? About mood and texture? About things that fit into categories and the ones that defy them?

No complete architecture has yet appeared in the history of the world because men, in this form of art alone, have obstinately sought to express themselves solely in terms either of the head or of the heart. I hold that architectural art, thus far, has failed to reach its highest development, its fullest capability of imagination, of thought and expression, because it has not yet found a way to become truly plastic: it does not yet respond to the poet's touch. That it is today the only art for which the multitudinous rhythms of outward nature, the manifold fluctuations of man's inner being have no significance, no place.