Podcast Interview: “I think the future of museums is much more collaborative, much less about the legacy of a specific institution and their own institutional history, but much more about relationships…”

Podcast Interview: “In our native language, there isn’t a word for art… the closest translation will be someone with wisdom—someone that serves the community… has responsibility to the community and to the ancestors…”

Podcast Interview: “You could also say it's like a dance on a razor's edge. And if you go towards one direction too far, you fall off. And if you go towards the other, it's a very delicate balance…”

Podcast Interview: "A lot of people, they just hear about deportations on the news. You hear about deportations. You hear about ICE deporting people. But what happens to people after they get deported?”

Podcast Interview: “Censorship in China and how artists get around it is already artwork in itself. There should be a book just talking about this. Sometimes it's frustrating, but it's also getting interesting.”

Podcast Interview: “I feel there are so many things that museums need to change, of course the whole narrative, but the display, how the body gets into the museum and sees things, feels things. I think it really needs a very big makeover.”

I wanted to discover that parallel world. It's like suddenly I fell in love. But it became more conscious as I grew up and realized that the real world was not enough.

As a working artist for over fifty years, there are a few other important things that I’d like to share with you, to try to set you up for success. For example, I hope that you realize that art is a business…

I simply knocked on the door and introduced myself and explained that I was a graduate student in the sculpture department at Yale and was working on an artwork that would be a memorial to victims of gun violence.

My first real professional mentor was Betty Kano at Pro Arts in Oakland. She was an artist, activist, and force of nature — someone who believed deeply in visibility for underrepresented artists long before that was common institutional language.

You really get wound together and you're different at the end of it in ways we can't necessarily perceive or calculate. I don't think we have the tools to measure it, but there's definitely a change at the end.

The same thing happened to me in Parma. There I was, practically on my deathbed, thinking, "Hey, look at all the stunning content around me. If I survive, it would be wise to have taken portrait photographs of my caregivers.

…that's what attention sickness means. There are other types of attention sickness too. I mean, the people who are constantly, what Buddhists call hungry ghosts. You can never be satisfied with anything

I remember the first time that I encountered a Joan Mitchell painting and just having this almost like visceral reaction where I didn't really know what I was looking at, but I was just so affected by the energy that it held. For the work to have that kind of emotional resonance…

…you know, I think that my practice is actually, in some ways, my grandmother's practice, in a very different sphere, but this idea of using something, whether it is a flower or technology, to draw people in…

To go back a little bit, my mother called a military recruiter because she was worried that I'd never leave the nest. So, one day out of high school, I came home, and there was a military guy on my porch…

In an age when museums seem to be failing us, in an age where the barrier for entry is always higher, that's not good for the arts. We need a lower cost barrier of entry.

In 2014, after climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, I suffered a pulmonary embolism and spent a week in the hospital. That sudden confrontation with mortality forced me to pause and question what I truly wanted in life.