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.
Art points to things. It's a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.
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.
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 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.
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.
Much of my work is engaged with 'America' - the idea of America.
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.
Things like Ferguson and Eric Garner show us there's an unequal distribution of forward momentum in 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.
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.
I really don't have a clear trajectory at all.
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.
Rather than say art is art and life is life, I like to say that they're joined and inextricable.
There was a time when I was a huge TV addict. I used to race home from school to watch 'Dark Shadows.'
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 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.
A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.
I don't know if I would describe myself as a political artist.
I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.
