Quotes from Glenn Ligon

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

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 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.

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

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

My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.

It's a great idea: to feel the rhythm of something by seeing how it flows on a page.

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.

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

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

So much of my work has been about disappearing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.