Glenn Ligon

“I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.”

“In 2011, 'Yourself in the World,' a book of my writings and interviews, was published in conjunction with a retrospective of my work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.”

“I don't cook, and I don't care to, but Gabrielle Hamilton made me realize that food is about love and connection. And she has had a hell of an interesting life.”

“I really don't have a clear trajectory at all.”

“There was a time when I was a huge TV addict. I used to race home from school to watch 'Dark Shadows.'”

“If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.”

“I make art to figure out what I'm thinking, not to tell people what I think.”

“A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.”

“'A Small Band' was commissioned for the facade of the Central Pavilion at the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale in 2013.”

“Sol LeWitt had a huge influence on my work because of his use of repetition and his clarity, setting up a system and letting that system go. That's kind of where the text paintings came from.”

“In '89, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. That's when I started to get into group shows. Suddenly, I sort of 'came out' as an artist.”

“Things like Ferguson and Eric Garner show us there's an unequal distribution of forward momentum in America.”

“Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.”

“I have been interested in neon for a long time. The first neon I made was in 2006, using the word 'America.'”

“I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.”

“I don't know if I would describe myself as a political artist.”

“The public schools in our neighborhood were so bad that the teachers in the school said you shouldn't send your kids here. My mother called around and found a school that was willing to give both me and my brother scholarship money. It's a classic story about black parents wanting more for their kids than they had for themselves.”

“Art points to things. It's a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.”

“Artists such as Lorna Simpson, Zoe Leonard, Byron Kim and Stephen Andrews and I are around the same age, and I know them personally. The discussions I have had with them over the years have influenced the work that I have made throughout my career.”

“There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.”