"Independence is both history-making and, in a sense, show business. The way you stage it matters enormously."

"Real success is being able to support my community and the people I love, and lift the stories that matter. I want people to leave my gallery feeling like positive value has been added to their life."

"I'm not seeking out rejection. But I know it exists, and I'm completely calloused to it. It's not an open wound anymore. It's calloused fingers, I’m used to it. So I'm able to surf the rejection."

“…my understanding of the book made me feel like I have the right to look at it, to potentially dismantle it, and to see how it's created. In doing so, I'm reshaping the Bible. I don't seek to destroy or desecrate it… I hold all the contradiction of the text, every bit of the story.”

“I had this itch — I went to film school, I grew up loving film and storytelling — to make something of my own just for the purpose of making it.”

“Not knowing is one of the best spaces to create, because there are no preconditions for what you might be able to do.”

“It is a time of tremendous change…But the arts aren't going to recover the city without artists.”

“We've never seen a collapse of all of the major art school programs and museums simultaneously. The di Rosa announces it's going to sell its property. The Contemporary Jewish Museum. You go through the list of losses in the last couple of years, and I don't think anybody with their eyes open can see it as anything but a magnificent collapse of an ecosystem.”

"Freedom of speech had become, like, memories."

“I was ready to give up art at that point. If nobody gave a shit, I was probably not going to give a shit myself…It gives me more pleasure than just about anything when artists who have been up on the tower say it’s been instrumental in moving forward to the next stage of their career.”

"The work is sort of a membrane between the inside of the artist and the social discourse of the imagination… We've watched lying becoming normal, the notion of alternative facts becoming an acceptable construct in terms of what we think of as news information."

Ingrid- "There's a dual story being told nationally: that the arts don't matter and at the same time, there's this huge effort to ban books.”

Chris- “When I finished that book, a Brazilian congressman named Jair Bolsonaro was just considering running for president and had a tiny cameo at the end. I finished thinking: 'Man, this has been way too dark. I was just too bleak in the picture I painted here.' That was 2018. Looking back now, eight years later — I probably wasn't bleak enough.”

“…had I not really immersed myself in what was going on in that center, I don't think I would have done what I'm doing — I'm certain of it. The other part is really personal. I walked into Creativity Explored for an opening and met my wife of eighteen years. She was a donor. We got married four months later. It was great. It's still great.”

As we navigate technological change, I think there will be an even greater need for people who genuinely care. A lot of my curatorial practice is rooted in care — care for artists, care for community, care for viewership. It's about stepping out of the binary of "I know" or "I don't know" and into "I care."

“First of all, if I were starting now, as well educated, after Baltimore, I'd have a hard time getting a job — I'm white, male, and straight. Three strikes. They might say, "You're really good, but we have too many male curators, too many white male curators."

"The biggest mistake I thought I could have made was to be angry or defensive. I was very much flying by the seat of my pants, trying to listen, to be understanding, while still defending the artwork's right to exist."

"There's just something amazing about taking this textile that has that image of providing warmth and comfort, and oh, it's talking about how many bullet holes are on this quilt that represent how many bullets are shot in a short period of time…”

"We were changing the mindsets of people. You had people who disagreed with us, what we were about, but wanted to set up breakfast programs, to do alternative schools. They were inspired by and beginning to implement those programs, transforming thinking, the mindset. That was the power of the Black Panther Party."