Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I really don't have a clear trajectory at all.
So much of my work has been about disappearing.
I met Obama once, backstage at the Apollo in Harlem.
I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.
I don't know if I would describe myself as a political artist.
Much of my work is engaged with 'America' - the idea of America.
A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.
If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.
My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.
I said to myself, "If the government thinks I'm an artist, I must be one."
The Carrie Mae Weems photograph 'Blue Black Boy,' I thought, was fantastic.
Is there such a thing as black art? Or are there just artists who are black?
Paint is a very sensual material. It's lovely to work with and lovely to look at.
It's a great idea: to feel the rhythm of something by seeing how it flows on a page.
Language controls how you are perceived by others, and in that sense, it is a prison.
In writing, something is always left out: it can't be articulated in the space of an essay.
Art points to things. It's a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.
Rather than say art is art and life is life, I like to say that they're joined and inextricable.
Like any artwork, things become richer if you know more about them; but I don't think that's crucial.
There was a time when I was a huge TV addict. I used to race home from school to watch 'Dark Shadows.'
What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.
I have been interested in neon for a long time. The first neon I made was in 2006, using the word 'America.'
Things like Ferguson and Eric Garner show us there's an unequal distribution of forward momentum in America.
Race is not something inherent to one's being: One does feel more or less colored, depending on the situation.
'A Small Band' was commissioned for the facade of the Central Pavilion at the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale in 2013.
I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.
Doors have an immediate familiarity. They're everywhere. They're scaled to our bodies, so there's something human about them.
Obama is the first African-American president, and for some people, that means a great deal, and for some people, it means very little.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint. We're in a world that's very fast, so things that slow you for a minute-give you pause-are good.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.
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.
At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.
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.
One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.
In government they learned their lesson. They don't trust artists anymore. Now the money has to go through arts organizations. But, yeah, back then you could get a grant, and I got $5,000 - a huge amount of money.
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.
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 love Thelonious 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 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.
My mother really didn't come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, "The only artists I've ever heard of are dead." The pottery classes were meant to be a part of my overall uplift. I knew what it meant to be sent to art classes, but I still didn't know anything about being an artist.
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.