Top 35 Glenn Ligon Quotes

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

It’s an artist’s job to always have their antennas up.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 really don’t have a clear trajectory at all.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Much of my work is engaged with ‘America’ – the idea of America.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.