I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.
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'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.
If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.
In writing, something is always left out: it can't be articulated in the space of an essay.
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 make art to figure out what I'm thinking, not to tell people what I think.
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.
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.
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.
What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.
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.
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.
I like having a studio to go to. It's like having a job.
It's an artist's job to always have their antennas up.
I have been interested in neon for a long time. The first neon I made was in 2006, using the word 'America.'
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 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.
The Carrie Mae Weems photograph 'Blue Black Boy,' I thought, was fantastic.
'A Small Band' was commissioned for the facade of the Central Pavilion at the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale in 2013.
