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[horn honking]

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[LIGON] I'm an artist because the National Endowment for the Arts

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used to give grants to individual artists.

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So I got a grant for drawing in 1989.

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That grant allowed me to make a decision,

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which was, I could keep working the job that I was working, 
40, 50 hours a week,

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or I could use that grant money to take some time off

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and really dive into this thing called being an artist.

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And so that grant was pivotal, actually.

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- Invites, please.

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- I'm so sorry about this party. Like...

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- It's fine. 
- Okay. [laughs]

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- It's all good.
- It's all good.

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- Everybody wants to come to this party all of a sudden.

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- We're gonna, like...

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LIGON: One of the things about having a 
retrospective at the Whitney is that I feel

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like I am coming to a place that I know very well,

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because the Whitney has the largest collection of my work in the country.

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I started showing at 
the Whitney in 1991, in the biennial.

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I know all the guards and I know all the curators.

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And so it’s a very easy place to navigate.

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- Today I was, like, awful. 
- That's all right, but you haven't changed your cell number?

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- No, no, it's the same. 
- All right, all right.

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Any opening of an exhibition is a bit like,

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“This Is Your Life.” So there were 
people that I haven’t seen in 30 years.

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- I'm so proud of you, i don't know what to say.

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Lots of family and lots of artist friends.

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- I mean, the line is outside...

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- We only just glance from room to room.

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- I know, we have to have a picture, a picture time.

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- Picture time.

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[ laughs ]

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LIGON: I won’t say it was fun to be there 
because I don’t like that level of scrutiny

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and attention. But I think it was interesting 
to be around so many people who wished me well.

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LIGON: The surprise of, of retrospective is

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that there’s more consistency than I 
had thought in how the work appears.

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There are several threads that tie 
together the show. One is an interest

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throughout the work in issues 
of legibility and illegibility.

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I’ve used language in various 
kinds of ways throughout my career.

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Another is concern with American history.

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Another thing is the return to color. And 
it is at the very beginning of my career,

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the earliest works in the show, but 
it returns towards the end as well.

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I didn’t really do drawings when I was a 
kid. I, I made copies of things.

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So I would, I had a good business when I was a kid, 
doing drawings of cartoon characters from

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the newspaper. And I would cut them out 
and sell them to my friends in school.

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And when I was in high school I knew 
that I wanted to be an artist.

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And my mother had sent me to after-school 
classes at the Metropolitan Museum.

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And I think my mother sent me to art classes 
because she thought that’s what a well-rounded

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citizen should have education in.

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Sort of arts in a general sense.

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But there was no one in my family who had been an artist and 
so there wasn’t really any role model for it.

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But I think the idea that I actually 
was going to be an artist horrified her,

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because artists don’t make any 
money. And what did she say?

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The only artists I’ve ever heard of 
are dead. And she meant Picasso.

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I think the artist that I was interested in 
when I first started working were de Kooning,

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Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock. That whole 
generation of abstract expressionists.

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At a certain moment I decided that being an 
abstract expressionist wasn’t quite going to do it.

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And that produced a kind of crisis in 
the studio. And what I decided to do was to

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incorporate the things that I was thinking about, 
the things I was reading into the work directly.

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And the models for that were 
people like Jasper Johns or,

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Rauschenberg. People who 
had used text in their work.

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When I first started doing that, I decided 
that I was just going to use my handwriting.

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And then after a while I decided, I’m 
not interested in telling my own stories.

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I’m interested in what other people have to say.

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There’s nothing wrong with self-expression, 
it just has its limits. And I think that the

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things that I was interested in were already in 
the world and so they didn’t need me to create

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them again in that way. They just needed for me 
to have them be brought into the work you know.

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The work became more about quotation, 
using texts from various literary sources.

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I read lots of things. I just read 
whatever I feel like reading. And if

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something stays in my head long 
enough it might turn into art.

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It was the one thing that when I was 
a child my mother would allow me,

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any book I wanted, no matter the 
cost. Expensive toys, or clothes, no.

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But any book. So that kind of uh, attention 
to books was, love of books came early.

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Ideas take a long time to be born, you 
know. They take a long time to gestate.

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They take a long time to come into 
the world. And that process is hard.

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- Gloves on.

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I guess what I’m committed to is, I don’t know,

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not love of painting, but love 
of the idea of making ideas.

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The first text paintings I made 
were single sentences by an author

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named Zora Neale Hurston, an African American 
woman, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

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The way I was making the paintings was to use 
plastic letter stencils and oil crayons.

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If you’re using letter stencils, you’re trying to 
make something with a sharp boundary, but oil

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crayons want to break out of those boundaries. 
They’re messy, they don’t keep their shape.

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And for about six months I think I tried to figure 
out how to make these oil crayons make nice,

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neat letters. And then I realized that 
the fact that they didn’t make nice,

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neat letters was actually much more interesting.

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Smudging them and transforming these letters into abstraction was what the paintings were about,

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but it took six months to figure that out.
[ chuckles ] You know?

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At first it was really important for me that 
I made these you know from start to finish.

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Now that’s not so important to me. It’s more 
important that I come in at a certain point

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where there is a base for me to work off 
of. And I find it interesting to work on

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something that’s sort of started out of my 
hands basically.

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The kinds of line breaks and kinds of spacings that they would make in 
presenting a text is very different than what

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I would do.

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And I often find that when I’m working,

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it’s the mistakes or it’s someone else’s suggestion or intervention that 
pushes the work forward.

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You know it’s the things that I didn’t think I was going 
to do that end up being the thing.....

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And sometimes that means you have to lose a 
little bit of control over things. You have to let them go to someone else.

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Let someone 
else work on them, collaborate with people.

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So often people say, "I get your message," but 
I don’t know think that message, if I have a

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message, is so separated from what the object 
is, how it’s painted.

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Indeed that’s where the work starts from,

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a kind of making rather than 
a message that is then layered into an object.

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There’s a series of paintings 
called The Coloring Book Paintings,

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which were based on the kids’ drawings.

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Often when I look for source material, 
I don’t know where I’m going to find it.

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And sometimes I don’t even know 
what I’m exactly looking for.

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When I found these, it was quite a 
surprise. I didn’t know they existed.

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So it’s the moment when educators are trying 
to figure out, how do you teach black history?

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So they create these coloring books that have 
images that any coloring book would have in them.

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Boys playing basketball juxtaposed 
with images of people like Harriet Tubman.

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I thought this was going to be an 
easy project for me.

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I really had to kind of inhabit the way a kid would 
hold a crayon or paint a painting.

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You know Picasso said he had to spend his 
whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child.

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And I know what he means now, it’s 
hard.

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But it was very instructive for me.

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That disconnect between what the kids 
imagine those images to be and what I

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as an adult bring to an image of say, 
Malcolm X was what the work was about.

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I first started doing neons because there’s 
a neon shop in my building.

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And one day I was walking by the neon shop and the owner, Matt, 
um, said, do you want a tour? And I said, sure.

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He makes work for corporations, but he also 
makes work for artists too. And I thought

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that was an interesting pairing.

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I’d been to that point, making paintings using black text on white backgrounds.

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So really just as a joke, I said, um, you know is there such a thing as black neon?

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And the owner of the shop, 
Matt, said, that’s against the laws of physics,

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because black is the absence of light. But then 
we started talking about it a bit and I realized

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that there was a way to do it, because one can 
take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front.

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So it would read as a black letter 
or a line, but it, it would also read as neon,

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because there would be light coming from behind 
that black letter. And once I realized that was

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possible, it became the connection between 
my painting work and these neons, using text.

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Lots of artists have used neon, so there 
are precedents for what I was doing.

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- Wait, what is that?

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Oh, so this is sort of telling you what the color’s going to look like when it’s lit inside.

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- Wow.

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How long do you have to pump 
the gas into the letter?

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SERGIO ALMARAZ: Ten, fifteen minutes, 
forty minutes.

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This is a neon gas, this is argon with mercury. And this is a mercury.

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- And then this is helium.
- Right.

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- And then this is argon gas. Argon with no mercury.
- Right.

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INTERVIEWER: Glenn, you’ve been working with 
neon and you never got the explanation for it?

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LIGON: No, it just kind of 
arrived, done. [ laughs ] It just arrived.

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First Neon was based on a little fragment of a Gertrude Stein novel called "Three 
Lives"

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and it says, "Negro Sunshine."

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I was interested in Gertrude Stein because she 
is interested in America, American history,

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trying to describe what America means, 
which I think is one of my projects too.

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For me, using neon was really about finding the 
connection between the work I was already doing and the neon.

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And until we had that discussion 
about black light, that hadn’t happened.

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There are paintings that emit light. The coal dust paintings do...

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Because they have this shiny black 
gravel-like substance called coal

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dust on top of them. And when you shine a 
light on that, it sparkles and glistens.

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And I started using coal dust in relationship 
to paintings because I was thinking about

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James Baldwin and the essay that I 
was using "Stranger In The Village."

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He’s an American author. He’s gone to Europe to 
work on a novel and he’s in this little Swiss village.

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It was written in the ‘50s. And the 
essay is about his relationship to the people

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who have no relationship to black Americans.

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And he’s trying to think through what it means to be a stranger somewhere.

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The kind of fascination 
and fear that strangers produce.

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I like the idea of using coal dust because it’s a waste product. It’s left over stuff from coal processing.

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The way it’s used on the paintings 
was interesting to me and seemed to

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be a kind of parallel to what 
Baldwin was talking about.

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It gets sprayed with this acrylic glue, 
cause otherwise all that coal dust is going

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to fall off the drawing.

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Glue and sprayers 
don’t really go together.

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So when it dries, it dries clear. Basically fancy Elmer’s Glue 
and water. Nothing very mysterious.

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Et voila.

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Paint is a very sensual material.

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It’s lovely 
to work with and lovely to look at.

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It’s also inefficient. We’re used to seeing text 
printed, we’re not used to seeing text

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made out of paint. And there’s a kind of 
slowness and inefficiency about rendering

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text in paint that’s interesting to me. It 
slows your reading down and it slows the

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viewer down in front of the paintings.

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And I think we’re in a world that’s very fast, so things that slow you for a minute, give you pause I think are good.

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LIGON: If you use jokes by a 
comedian like Richard Pryor,

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they need to be jokes in color. So the paintings 
have to have color in them.

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They allowed me to go back to my abstract expressionist days 
when I made paintings that were very colorful.

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- [ laughing ]

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[ voices overlapping ]

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[ LIGON ] Well the struggle is always that the 
idea you have in your head about what you want to

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say in your work versus the means you have to say 
it with or your abilities or your skills or,

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the technical limitations of the medium you’re 
working in. So it’s, there’s always sort of, like,

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the ideal painting in your head, and you never 
quite get to that. And so you make something,

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and it’s almost there, it’s not quite right, 
you make something else. It’s almost there,

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it’s not quite right. 
You make something else.

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It’s almost there, it’s not quite right.

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But that process doesn’t end, 
you know? Eventually just, that, that is the process.

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You know, you just keep going.