Have you talked to Giuliani or heard anything new since the front-page New York Times story on Friday?

I haven't heard anything personally. I heard he might have said some things on TV this weekend but I wasn't around.

You say your work isn't about sex. Why isn't it? You are there, naked, and it's sexual; it's not like Botticelli's Venus.

When I do these images, the sexual element isn't there for me at all. It's about the body and the form. It's not like I have an image there with me and a dildo flying around. People keep trying to put it in this context. The thing is, here in America, it still is a very puritanical state of mind going on and when people of Giuliani's ilk see something that is nude, somehow they react that it's obscene. I say you should refer back to Greek antiquities. The Met is full of naked Greek statues and no one is upset about that.

It's 2001 and we should be able to push past this. I don't see the big deal. I lived in France and this kind of thing is not a problem. Here, they keep saying it's obscene ... maybe because it's a black female body. We are all created in the likeness of God; there shouldn't be any problem with anyone presenting themselves as such. The hoopla and the fury are because I'm a black female. It's ironic that Chris Ofili [whose work "The Holy Virgin Mary" was attacked by Giuliani last year when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art] and I are both of African descent ... It's about me having nothing to hide. For me to represent myself in the nude is the purest way of doing things.

Giuliani is not saying it's obscene as much as he's saying it's anti-Catholic.

I don't know what they're talking about, anti-Catholic. I grew up Catholic and I feel that as a Catholic and having been put through that, I have the right to critique it. It has nothing to do with being anti-anything. All my art is very personal -- it comes from a personal place. And this piece ["Yo Mama's Last Supper"] is from a much larger body of work called "Flipping the Script" that includes the Pietà, Adam and Eve and [Michelangelo's] David.

But it's not just any body. It's your very good-looking, sexy body.

I use myself to avoid the exploitation issue. I would be hard pressed to say to you that this body of work is sexual. The next body of work is sexual. It deals with female fantasy and desire and how that ties into family.

Has all your work been photographic?

Yes, it's my medium. I wanted to be an independent filmmaker. I was always interested in the visual. But I had a baby boomer reaction and was into the immediate gratification of photography as opposed to film, which is a more laborious project. But I started making little films with an 8 mm camera in fifth grade.

Have any artists inspired you?

Not necessarily, no. I've looked at many things and studied. But it's not a situation where I've embraced any particular person. What I've done is melded all of it together -- Gordon Parks, Richard Avedon, [Irving] Penn. My background was in fashion, but there's no idol worship.

So, to get back to "Yo Mama's Last Supper" -- you were critiquing the Catholic Church ...

And the position women have held in the church, which is not holding any position. It becomes a protest, but that wasn't my intention. It was more about a critique. It also comes from research that I did -- about the Catholic Church and how affairs were handled around slavery and Catholicism ... Are there messages underneath? No, there are not. It's just that African-Americans are invisible, especially in Renaissance art. And Christianity is big in the African-American community, but there are no representations of us. I took it upon myself to include people of color in these classic scenarios. That is the most important thing.

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