(gentle music playing) - I really have this deep belief that images can change the world.

(gentle music playing) It's not that I've started making work with that belief, but it's what I've come to know.

(gentle music playing) I wanted to paint a quiet and powerful portrait of her, that offered the viewer a different kind of moment (gentle music playing) and make it truly about her and not about the First Lady title.

(gentle music playing) - To allow it to have fingerprints and to show the touching and the making.

The making, the actual making of something is our power, is our greatness.

(gentle music playing) Right now, we're here in Santa Clara.

My people were living here between these mountain ranges along this river.

It's considered a tri-cultural place, where we have the indigenous ancestry, and then the Spanish, and also the English-speaking colonizing.

Many of us are descendants of all those things, like myself.

(waves crashing) - Tonight, Maria's direct hit, devastating Puerto Rico.

(dull clanging) - If I wanted to make sculpture, I just didn't know how to proceed.

All of the people making sculpture were using the wood shop or the metal shop and those places did not feel safe for a young gay guy.

Like I didn't know how to find myself there.

Softening these things that seem to be hard is my way of taking down that machismo a notch and to say like there's room for more tender way of understanding what it means to be human.

(gentle music playing) If I think of some kind of icon as a flat symbol, how do I give it depth?

I want that, I think, of the people I admire or the people that confuse me.

I want depth.

(gentle music playing)