Doors have an immediate familiarity. They’re everywhere. They’re scaled to our bodies, so there’s something human about them. Glenn Ligon Read Quote
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. Glenn Ligon Read Quote
Language controls how you are perceived by others, and in that sense, it is a prison. Glenn Ligon Read Quote
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. Glenn Ligon Read Quote
Rather than say art is art and life is life, I like to say that they’re joined and inextricable. Glenn Ligon Read Quote
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. Glenn Ligon Read Quote
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. Glenn Ligon Read Quote
Things like Ferguson and Eric Garner show us there’s an unequal distribution of forward momentum in America. Glenn Ligon Read Quote
