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People just decided I was an R&B artist because I'm black.

In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.

Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.

It's possible and available to any artist to be himself or herself on their own terms, to be accepted and embraced by black people. You don't have to be a thug to get love from black people.

My style is black. It's hip-hop. It's who I am.

It's unfortunate that a lot of people think African-American female artists are monolithically R&B this-or-that, don't have to do anything by default.

My interest as an artist is to illuminate the lives of black folks. I definitely am focused on films that illustrate all that we are and all our nuance and all our complicated beauty and mess, and when you're telling those stories, you gotta have black actors.

The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them.

Artists should be free to create what we want. I believe there's a special value in work that is a reflection of oneself as opposed to interpretation. When I see a film or a TV show about black people not written by someone who's black, it's an interpretation of that life.