Glenn Ligon Quotes

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

Claudia Rankine's book-length poem 'Citizen' was nominated for National Book Critics Circle awards in the categories of poetry and criticism. It is one of the most devastating takes on American culture I have read in a long time, laying bare the stakes of being black in a country long ambivalent about our presence here.

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

I took a very small image and blew it up to enormous scale. What happens when you do that is that the information in the image starts to become indistinct. The image darkens.

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

In high school, driver's ed was at the same time as drama class. And I had to take drama class. Now I can sing the lead in 'Oklahoma!,' but I can't drive.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

So much of my work has been about disappearing.

- Glenn Ligon

Rather than say art is art and life is life, I like to say that they're joined and inextricable.

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon

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

- Glenn Ligon