I grew up in New York City, the son of a teacher and a schoolteacher.
I was a member of the city’s first African American preschool, but I was not the first black person to work in a Manhattan restaurant.
I remember the first time I went to a museum and was introduced to the work of African American painters.
It was a time in which I never felt like I belonged.
I had a mother who had taught me to appreciate art.
My father was a black man, but my mother was white.
The only time I felt like an outsider was when I was younger, when I visited my grandmother in the Bronx.
She had lived in Harlem since her husband died.
She told me that her parents had taken her to Harlem when she was five.
They lived there for decades.
She said that they didn’t have any money, but they worked hard, and when she returned to New York to visit them, they had no choice but to move to Harlem, too.
“The black experience is so much more complicated,” she said.
“When I think of that place, I think about what my mother’s life would have been like.”
My mother was a nurse.
I am not a nurse, but it was something that was part of my childhood.
I grew to love it and wanted to be a nurse when I grew older.
I went through my first internships, at NYU and the School of Visual Arts.
It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I realized that my mother worked in the art world.
I wanted to become a painter.
When I was 17, I decided to become an artist myself.
The work that I was doing in the studio came to my attention when I saw a portrait of my mother.
I saw that she had worked as a nurse at Harlem Hospital in New Orleans.
It had been in the early 1960s.
My mother had been a nurse there.
When she moved to Harlem for work, she took the house down to the basement and had it renovated.
It’s been a place where I have spent the past decade painting.
I love the city, but also like the people in it.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been told that I am a “pioneering” black artist, because of my art.
I would love to know how many other black people were doing this kind of work.
I have a feeling that many of them were.
When people think of me, they are thinking about the past, the present, and the future.
My grandfather is the first person to call me black.
His name is George.
I never had any idea who he was.
He came from Jamaica and lived in Brooklyn, where I grew out of school.
My parents are white, and my brother is white.
My sister is white, too, and we were both raised in a white household.
My mom is my favorite uncle.
My grandmother was an aunt to two white people, one of whom is my mother-in-law.
I think she loved me and I loved her, and she is now my best friend.
My favorite uncle was my grandfather.
He was my grandmother’s best friend, too—but I never knew that until I became an adult.
My uncle’s family had lived with the family for years.
We had a beautiful house in Jamaica.
My grandparents had a house in Brooklyn.
My great-uncle was my father’s grandfather.
My grandma was a grandpa who died when I got my first job.
I met my grandmother when I started painting.
She loved my paintings, and after I started, she was the one who introduced me to painting.
My first brushstroke was when my grandmother gave me a painting to try.
It took me years to master the technique.
When we started, we used a brush that she gave me.
When the painting started to dry, I was the only one who was able to hold it.
When it was done, I had to put it away.
I didn’t really know what to do with it.
It is still a piece of art.
In the years after my grandmother died, my mother moved to New Orleans and took a job in the city as a secretary.
I used to work as a janitor at the Museum of Fine Arts.
My granddad was a janitors’ union steward.
He died when we were teenagers.
My other grandad was a teacher.
I learned to paint from him, and I think he still remembers me.
I lived in New Jersey for five years, when my parents moved to Florida.
My stepmother was my first great-grandmother.
My two brothers are my father and grandfather.
I feel like my father is a part of who I am.
I will always have that connection to my mother, who died after a long battle with lung cancer.
She and my father fought with heart disease and died from it.
My dad died of cancer and my mom died from cancer. I see
