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 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.

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.

Glenn Ligon Quotes