Glenn Ligon

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Much of my work is engaged with 'America' - the idea of America.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.