Glenn Ligon

“What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.”

“Literature has been a treacherous site for black Americans because literary production has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing.”

“Language controls how you are perceived by others, and in that sense, it is a prison.”

“I love Monk's song, 'Just a Gigolo.' It's probably a minor song for him, but whenever I hear a recording of him playing it, I'm mesmerized because Monk clearly loved pop music. He took it very seriously and made an amazing thing out of it.”

“My mother used to say that when I told her that I wanted to be an artist, her famous line was, 'The only artists I've ever heard of are dead.' It just wasn't in her experience... I don't think she had a sense that one could be an artist, because there wasn't anyone in my family who had done that.”

“Black and white is so familiar. It's how we see the printed word in books, so it's kind of neutral in a way. Yet it's ironic that black and white is so charged socially, what with its association with race.”

“I was in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and the 1994 'Black Male' show at the Whitney, and I've never seen such vicious press. Twenty plus years later, critics who hated that Biennial have come to Jesus and decided it was a really important, seminal show that they misunderstood.”

“In writing, something is always left out: it can't be articulated in the space of an essay.”

“I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.”

“Much of my work is engaged with 'America' - the idea of America.”

“One of the interesting things about quoting in an artwork is that there is a repeated confusion about who is speaking - one essentially becomes the author of a quote one uses.”

“Race is not something inherent to one's being: One does feel more or less colored, depending on the situation.”

“An artwork is an arrangement of things. The ideal show for me would be if everything touched, literally touched, so that everything would blur together.”

“I met Obama once, backstage at the Apollo in Harlem.”

“The Carrie Mae Weems photograph 'Blue Black Boy,' I thought, was fantastic.”

“I graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in art. I was really headed toward an architecture degree, but when I did the requirements for the major, I realized I was more interested in how people live in buildings than in making buildings. I was more interested in the interactions that happened inside the structures.”

“Obama is the first African-American president, and for some people, that means a great deal, and for some people, it means very little.”

“Doors have an immediate familiarity. They're everywhere. They're scaled to our bodies, so there's something human about them.”

“Is there such a thing as black art? Or are there just artists who are black?”

“I like having a studio to go to. It's like having a job.”