Art points to things. It's a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.
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.
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.
A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.
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.
I met Obama once, backstage at the Apollo in Harlem.
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.
The Carrie Mae Weems photograph 'Blue Black Boy,' I thought, was fantastic.
I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.
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.
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.
There was a time when I was a huge TV addict. I used to race home from school to watch 'Dark Shadows.'
Rather than say art is art and life is life, I like to say that they're joined and inextricable.
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.
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.
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.
Much of my work is engaged with 'America' - the idea of America.
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.
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.
Things like Ferguson and Eric Garner show us there's an unequal distribution of forward momentum in America.
I really don't have a clear trajectory at all.
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 don't know if I would describe myself as a political artist.
I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.
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'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.
If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.
In writing, something is always left out: it can't be articulated in the space of an essay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.
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 like having a studio to go to. It's like having a job.
It's an artist's job to always have their antennas up.
I have been interested in neon for a long time. The first neon I made was in 2006, using the word 'America.'
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.
'A Small Band' was commissioned for the facade of the Central Pavilion at the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale in 2013.
So much of my work has been about disappearing.
Race is not something inherent to one's being: One does feel more or less colored, depending on the situation.
Is there such a thing as black art? Or are there just artists who are black?
Language controls how you are perceived by others, and in that sense, it is a prison.
Doors have an immediate familiarity. They're everywhere. They're scaled to our bodies, so there's something human about them.
