"What the literary arts do is provide you with that vocabulary. So you can name the place where it hurts. You can name that itch — and now you know where to go and scratch."

"The most invisible type of censorship is actually the art market…You have to see the arts as a way to keep your humanity, not as a way to make a living."

"We have a government that's behaving in a very fragile way — when they put in measures to limit what people can learn in schools and what they can talk about in the workplace, that's coming from a deep fear of the truth."

“You can’t just hide under the table and hope this goes away…There’s an idea that we’ll be able to push back on the technology, and I don’t think that’s ever worked.”

“Traditional society is, for an artist, something like a battery — an accumulator of energy gathered over thousands of years of cultural change.”

"It's the very best life anybody could ask for if you get to create visual art for a living. But you still have to remain free. You still have to be able to create whatever you want, whenever you want. Why do this for a living unless you're a thousand percent free?"

“As Native peoples, we've endured a lot — systemic racism, colonization. Being in museum spaces is an opportunity to reverse some of those injustices, and to Indigenize spaces.”

"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."