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" 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. "

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" 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

Amazing

Song

Music

" 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 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. "

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

Glenn Ligon

Thought

Practice

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

Glenn Ligon

Studio

Having

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

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

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

" 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 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

Care

Love

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

" 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. "