Artist, Glenn Ligon: My name is Glenn Ligon and I’m an artist living and working in New York City.
This work was based on an essay by Zora Neale Hurston, African American writer, who wrote in the twenties, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.” One of the things she’s doing in that essay is trying to negotiate her sense of herself as an individual versus when she goes out into the world and discovers that she’s a Black child.
I think I first encountered Hurston’s essay in college. And the idea of explaining “how it feels to be colored me” was something that I had to do in that context.
When I first started using oil paint and letter stencils, I realized that there was no way to make clean, perfect letters, and, in fact, their messiness was the most interesting thing. And so the idea of something going from clarity to abstraction is in a lot of my work, and it is about the unknowability of things like identity and race, their unstableness.
I think the relationship between abstraction and text is a kind of pessimism, [laughs] in a way, on my part. An idea that not everything can be explained in language, that text remains opaque and difficult, and I want to stage that difficulty in my artworks.