Glenn Ligon

EO

What was your college experience like? How did it inform your desire to be an artist?

GL

I started college at Wesleyan University. But it had a very small art department, consisting of maybe four or five professors in total. When I started seriously thinking about being an artist, I didn’t know exactly what that meant except that I should probably go to art school rather than a liberal arts school.

But when I transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design for my junior year, I realized several things. One was that art students at that time were only interested in making what we might call “visual art.” They weren’t interested in movies or books. They were only interested in what was happening in their studio. So the kinds of discussions that I could have at Wesleyan were not the kinds of discussions taking place at RISD. The second realization was more practical, and was essentially that they make life very hard for transfer students. They gave very little financial aid, and they made me repeat a year. I would have had to pay for an extra year and be treated as if I knew nothing. I realized that art schools were quite conservative in some ways. They believed that they had something specific to teach you and that you couldn’t learn it anywhere else. I realized that not only was that false, but also that their imagination about what being an artist could be was limited. So eventually I transferred back to Wesleyan to finish things off.

EO

What happened before college that cemented your desire to pursue art?

GL

I was always drawing in notebooks when I was a teenager. I had a long commute from the South Bronx to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I went to private school from first to 12th grade at the Walden School, and I would draw on the train ride. And also, because private schools have art teachers, I was introduced to having studio classes as a regular part of my education from a very young age. My mom saw my interest as a positive one, so when my art teacher told her that I could take drawing classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she put her pennies together and sent me off. She also sent me to pottery classes in Greenwich Village. My mom sacrificed a lot to cultivate my interests.

EO

Did you understand that art was a possible path forward at that point?

GL

I knew that art was important to me, but I didn’t know that it was important to anyone else. I didn’t know that it could be a profession. I come from a family of civil servants for whom steady income and government jobs were the goal and everything else one did was secondary. But I knew early on that being an artist meant you had to prioritize it. But I had no role models in art, so I didn’t really know any of the specifics. So my default path going into college was to study architecture. Then it was clear that I was much happier in the studio art courses that were a requirement for the major. By the time I transferred to RISD, I knew I wasn’t going to be an architect because I was more interested in how people lived in houses, in how to decorate houses than I was in building houses. So I transferred to RISD because I wanted to be an artist, even though I didn’t quite know what that meant. And that was not something I learned more about there. One of my first professors there spent a considerable amount of our first meeting talking about my pink sneakers because he loved them. Eventually I was just like, “Why am I paying tens of thousands of dollars for this?”

EO

What initially interested you in architecture?

GL

I was always interested in the urban planning side of it. Partially because I grew up in a context where you couldn’t help but think about how architecture influences one’s trajectory. I grew up in public housing. The projects in the South Bronx are Corbusier fantasies, towers in a park incircled by urban devastation. But in the mid 1970s we moved to another housing project in the Northeast Bronx, which was basically like moving to the suburbs. My family only got there because a white social worker wrote a letter on our behalf; it was very hard to transfer between projects because there was some idea of racial balance that the Housing Authority upheld. To transfer to a project that still had white tenants in it was pretty impossible if you were a Black family. They thought that all the white folks would move out if Black folks started to move in. And that was very apparent to me because the project that I lived in at that time, Baychester Houses, was probably 50% white and 50% Black and Latino, while the project across the street, Eden Wall, was probably 95% Black and Latino. That imbalance was very obvious in terms of how the projects were maintained. It was basically segregation, and you understood it. It was obvious.

So alongside the Cézanne’s I would sketch during my drawing classes at The Met, I would also draw fantasy buildings. I would build Lego models of skyscrapers and bring them to school in my little plastic briefcase. My brother and I would build little cities on our bed with cardboard boxes and run our matchbox cars through them. That was the beginning of an interest in that world, which I held onto for a long time because I could tell my relatives that I wanted to be an architect. They understood it because it was a profession. Besides, they all lived somewhere, and understood that somebody had built these things, whereas wanting to be an artist was an abstraction.

EO

You got the early stuff out of the way, school and all that. You got the NEA grant in 1989, when you were 29. How did this move you forward?

GL

Yeah, that was a turning point because it seemed like an enormous amount of money at the time. But it also served as a validation. Suddenly getting a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts meant that the government thought I was an artist. That gave me permission to be an artist in a weird way. If you’re making $10 an hour at a law firm, $5,000 is an enormous amount of money, and it allowed me to make a decision. Was I going to try to be an artist full time with $5,000, or would I just keep working 40 or 50 hours a week for this law firm? The law firm was fun, though, don’t get me wrong. Wayne Koestenbaum was there, the artist Byron Kim was there, Michael Cunningham was there.

EO

Was this just a gig that people working in the arts could get easily?

GL

Yeah, this place was kind of affirmative action for artists. If I’d done pre-law things in school, I never would’ve been hired at this firm. They were hiring college educated people in the arts and then they’d just teach us how to do what they needed. Because of that and because they paid relatively well, there was an amazing group of people there. During this period, I was in little group shows here and there. I was sending my slides to The Drawing Center in New York, I was applying for everything. But that NEA grant was the first time I got serious recognition. Because of it, I could take more time off, I could think more strategically about what it meant to be an artist.

EO

Let’s talk about the s-word. It’s one of my favorite.

GL

I’m going to sound like a curmudgeon, but I guess I am. Because the art world is so professionalized now, people think that there are steps to becoming an artist. First, you try to get into Yale or Columbia University, then a gallery picks you up. People think that there are steps. I didn’t know what those steps were at that moment, so I tried everything. I submitted my slides and volunteered places and applied for everything. Strategic is maybe too strong a word. I don’t know if it’s strategic to try everything.

EO

It’s one approach.

GL

Or maybe it’s just desperation. But very early on, I realized that the art world was a network and things happened because you were in the right places. At the time, I showed some little paintings at a small show in downtown Brooklyn and thought that no one would see them. Of course, that’s the show that Lisa Phillips at The Whitney saw; that’s the show that Robert Storr, who had just become a curator at the Museum of Modern Art saw; that was where I met Suzan-Lori Parks, who was putting on a play in the theater upstairs; that’s where the director George Wolfe saw my work. He bought a painting, because some of the paintings had text by Zora Neale Hurston, and at that moment, he was adapting her short stories for a production on Broadway. So I met all of these people because of this little show in a loft gallery in downtown Brooklyn.

None of the museums were interested in my work until this show. It became a portal for them to get to know it. Lisa Phillips’s visit to that show prompted her to make a studio visit while she was curating the 1990 Whitney Biennial. She took her little Chanel suit over to my dumpy studio in a basement in Williamsburg that was flooded on the day she visited. I was a late choice, so everything moved fast. I think she had already decided but she just needed to see things in person again. She told me that the catalogs were going to press soon and that they needed photographs as soon as possible. At the time I was working with a gallery called Max Protetch in SoHo, but he hadn’t offered me anything formal. So Lisa Phillips asked if we could take two of the paintings to the gallery to have them photographed. I called up Max to tell him what was happening. So I called a car service with a station wagon and she helped me move the paintings, rolled up her little Chanel suit sleeves and helped me load them in the car. We drove from Williamsburg to SoHo and got the paintings photographed. Unbeknownst to me, she asked Max Protetch if the Whitney could buy them. And he told her that he had already bought them. He was totally shady. Lesson for young artists! For years, I didn’t know that this had happened, because she didn’t tell me. Later on, I found out and realized why I got a check the next day from Max Protetch Gallery. He knew that if he kept them, they would be worth way more after they had been in the Biennial.

EO

What did it mean to engage Blackness at the beginning of your practice versus now? When you first began, you've noted that were only able to engage James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” in fragments. Now you’re able to take the text on as a whole. What was expected of you and of a Black artist during the early part of your career?

GL

I think it sort of fits into some kind of trajectory. We’re in a moment of Black figuration. I think in some ways, the early ’90s was a similar moment. The demand around representation was coming partially from Black artists themselves (think about Kerry James Marshall’s project of introducing Black figures into museum spaces), but also partially from a white art world that required a visible difference. There was a sense that an image of a Black person doing something in a painting or in a photograph was enough because the mere presence of Blackness was enough to demarcate. There was a lack of an interrogation of the politics of these images. It seemed like just having Black bodies at that moment was enough because it allowed for an easy way to talk about the work. The works were immediately only about identity. The critique at the time was that Black people only make work about their identity, but at the same time, the foregrounding of Black identity was enough to talk about.

EO

It was both the expectation and the projection.

GL

Yes, and the limitations. I think artists from my generation, like Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and others, were thinking more conceptually about these issues of representation. They were touchstones for me at that moment.

EO

It’s weird to me because you guys were accepted by these institutions because your work was legible within a framework that, I hate to say, transcended race. You all were using Blackness as material, but Blackness wasn’t the identity. I was first exposed to this framework of thinking in college when I was introduced to Adrian Piper’s Catalysis III (1970) series. Acquiring the language of what ‘indexicality’ and indexical thinking could do and how it reproduces you as a subject-object cemented a lot of my anxieties. Conceptual thinking wasn’t a container, it was a tunnel. It allowed me to bridge theories on how to mark personhood and time. Adrian’s work makes me think of Bruce Nauman. In the way that it’s dry yet direct in its humor and how it addresses the audience, while being self-aware. Both yours and Lorna’s early photography work registers as Californian or West Coast to me. Maybe because that’s where I first encountered it.

GL

[Laughs.] Oh, that’s funny because I hate California. I feel like my work is very East Coast in a way, in the sense that it’s deeply indebted to the Whitney ISP, to Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, and Joseph Kosuth. That way of working with text conceptually feels very East Coast to me, and it was my trajectory.

EO

How did you get to the Whitney Independent Study Program?

GL

I just sent my slides. But I was an abstract painter and they weren’t interested in abstract painting, but they let me in because they thought they could beat it out of me somehow. But it was an important turning point for me because it allowed me to think more. And it introduced me to people who were thinking more conceptually about the use of text. It introduced me not only to other artists in the program, like Mark Dion and Ashley Bickerton, but also to people they brought in, like Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, and Mary Kelly.

And of course, I was introduced to the people who were teaching there, like Craig Owens. But still, the ISP was very segregated in that the artists and the scholars didn’t interact very much.

EO

What did that mean for someone who’s so literary like yourself?

GL

My literary interests didn’t align with theirs. [Laughs.] I’ve told this story many times, but my studio mate at ISP had never heard of James Baldwin. Not only had she not read James Baldwin, she had literally never heard his name. She knew who Lacan was, but not Baldwin. [Laughs.] Either way, they gave me a framework to think about how to use texts in a more conceptual way.

EO

How did it feel to be on the ground, experiencing that dichotomy, working with what is inherently Black material within that conceptual framework at the same time? Thelma Golden talks about you being her thought partner during this time. How did your practice formalize through these relationships?

GL

Those relationships were gradual. The dialogues that Thelma and I had were certainly about art but were more generally about how to negotiate life. What did it mean to be a young artist living in Brooklyn, what did it mean for her to be a young curator? I met her when she was working for Kellie Jones at the Jamaica Arts Center, and it was kind of an introduction to the fact that there are many art worlds. [Laughs.] I learned about the art world that she inhabited as a junior curator at the Whitney and the kinds of things that were expected of her there and the Jackie Robinson moments that occurred from being the first Black curator there. Those were things she was negotiating in real time as I was negotiating what it meant to be in the Biennial, and what was expected to come of that. We were figuring it out together, but I would say those things happened more organically than a seminar model of like, “Let’s sit down and talk about the state of Black art today.” It was more like, “Can you believe that the press release said I was born in a housing project? I was born in a hospital.” [Laughs.]

EO

In a lot of ways, you were really the guinea pigs. Before the internet, being in the Whitney Biennial carried with it different currencies. It was really like making it. But it also propelled you into a certain sphere of the art world, which I’m sure required some code switching to navigate. What did that feel like?

GL

I think I was naive in some ways and people made me aware of my naivete. I was in the 1991 Biennial as a painter who employed a Zora Neale Hurston text. Some of those paintings were acquired by good collectors and I think the Whitney Museum actually did get to buy two of those. But then in the ’93 Biennial, I showed Notes on the Margin of the Black Book. That’s when my dealer at the time and other collectors thought I had lost my mind. They thought I was throwing away my painting career to show this artwork that cut up passages from a Mapplethorpe book and put quotes next to them. But I knew that that was kind of the direction I wanted my practice to go in, that I wasn’t a Painter with a capital “P.” I use painting, but I’m not a painter. Maybe painting is a touchstone, but I wasn’t all that interested in all the nuances and what not. Blackness as a subject matter or as a material couldn’t be explored in painting. This feeling is where Notes on the Margin came from.

EO

And then you introduced your own lexicon as a point of departure.

GL

Yeah. And in retrospect, there is definitely a clear correspondence between the photo work and the painting work. For one, there’s always quotation and citation. But that wasn’t legible at the time. Then the next show was Thelma’s Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art in 1994 at the Whitney Museum, which included some paintings that had Richard Pryor jokes on them. They had some nasty jokes on them, but at least they were paintings. I was tiptoeing the line between just being like Arthur Jafa and doing what I wanted and being naive about the consequences of those things.

EO

One of my favorite works of yours is the Black Rage series, which came about around the same time. I thought they were really important because they were only aesthetic insofar as you engage the object in a certain way, but the emphasis is on the conceptual backing of that framework.

GL

It reminds me of my experience of being in a show recently that was about figuration and having to tell the curator that they would really have to dig to find figurative work by me. In the trajectory of my career, there’s not a lot of it. But I think those early text paintings that say “I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background” are figurative paintings in a way. I just think one needs to expand those categories. I’ve also been thinking about this a lot recently because I have a show coming up that is, in part, dealing with annotations. In some ways, the work has been about that all along. For me, paint was about a kind of annotation, the process of making it—like I’m annotating the text just by making it in paint.

EO

It’s a form of marking.

GL

Yeah. And that ties into thinking about Notes on the Margin of the Black Book as literally a project of annotation.

EO

What was your experience of the Black Male show like? I’ve heard all of Thelma’s bits on it, all of Hilton Als’s bits. What do you think about it in retrospect?

GL

I just think about the importance of bringing all of these disparate voices that were dealing with the same subject matter into the same space. Looking back on it, I think I showed the Richard Pryor paintings because it felt like a safe context to do so. It feels funny to say that now, but the context appeared as the work was being made, and it felt like it made sense. Thelma went for them immediately. Eventually I realized that I was the least of the problems in that show. I don’t think the audience was surprised to see them in a show called Black Male.

EO

Yeah, in making work for that context, you kind of can’t be held accountable for what the audience says. They knew what they were in for ahead of time, that social contract had been signed and delivered.

GL

Yeah. I think there were certain expectations that the show would be a celebration. I think this was true particularly among Black folks, some of whom thought they would be getting paintings of Frederick Douglass or something. They thought it would be some sort of positive image debate basically. But instead they were confronted by Richard Pryor jokes about faggots, niggers, and Lyle Ashton Harris in a tutu.

EO

Was the planning of the show a social thing? Were you all talking amongst yourselves?

GL

No. Well, I’m sure there were artists who knew each other and were talking. I don’t think I knew Lorna Simpson well enough to be like, “Girl, what are you going to show up in there?” It wasn’t like that. [Laughs.] And besides, I love her to death, but she scared me. She was too smart, too fierce, too beautiful. I thought she would see through my shit right away. Thinking about it now, Black Male made community because we all went through it together. I feel like that’s when I got to know Lyle a bit better as a practitioner. That’s when I got to know Gary Simmons better. I didn’t really run with a crew back then.

EO

What was the context around your and Lorna’s work at that point?

GL

I don’t think we were in shows together often, and I started to be influenced by another crowd. Kellie Jones did a big show called Interrogating Identity at the Grey Art Museum at NYU. That show was when I met a lot of the Black British artists. Keith Piper and Donald Rodney were in that show. Through meeting them, I realized that Britain was way ahead of the United States in terms of debates around representation. I started going to the UK with some regularity, and was in a show that Lynne Cooke did at the Hayward Gallery called Double Take: Collective Memory and Current Art. It was an important show. But more importantly, that was when I saw David Bailey’s show Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. There I met Kobena Mercer, Isaac Julien, and Stuart Hall. This period, with all of these introductions to British artists and thinkers, was formative. It was the second shift in my career. The Whitney program introduced me to the potential of a more conceptual text-based practice. Going to London in the early ’90s introduced me to the debates that were taking place about Black representation.

EO

Do you think the reason for the legibility of these debates in the UK can be pinned to Stuart Hall’s work?

GL

Maybe. But it also came from the art being made. Like the way Julien’s Looking for Langston dealt with these questions of Black representation, with text, with the constraints about what could be said about Langston because of the estate’s limits. How he dealt with all of that was important. I don’t know if I understood the implications and the strategies of everything he was doing, but it was important for me. The way he mined and used the archive as material to be played with was something I learned about in earnest in these spaces. And then it was furthered by meeting, hearing, and reading Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, and Homi Bhabha. There were lectures and conferences around these exhibitions, which was completely new to me. It was normal there. If you were doing a show at the ICA or the Hayward or wherever, and you were a Black British curator or artist, you organized talks. The artists were expected to talk. That was the norm there, which I don’t think was true in the United States at that moment. The Black Popular Culture Conference at the Studio Museum in Harlem, with Dia Center for the Arts as a partner, was a watershed moment just because they brought Stuart Hall over. I remember going to his talk and people were clapping but he was like, “Don’t clap yet. You might not like what I have to say. Y’all Americans are very obsessed with things that we find problematic, like the guarantee that a Black body is political just because they’re Black. That’s not how we’re rolling in the UK.” That was great.

EO

If you were in the UK in the early ‘90s, did you ever hang out with a young Steve McQueen or John Akomfrah?

GL

We were in different camps. I think there’s room for everybody now, whereas back then there was more of an impulse to stake your position and stay there. I did meet Steve McQueen when we were both in Bailey’s Mirage show. He was installing Bear and I thought, “Who is this brother polishing the floor 15 times?” And then he turns on the projector and the image is reflected onto the floor, doubling it, and I realized it was genius. But I remember being a little ambivalent about the way that his work was being framed. For example, in Deadpan, which is a take on that Buster Keaton scene where the house falls on him, the tension between reading the body as a Black body and not wanting it to be read as a Black body is a little overdetermined. Nevertheless, there was a refusal of that overdetermination in the space that Steve operated in. But I think Steve’s position around that has changed, especially in the most recent work that I’ve seen.

EO

[Laughs.] I love Deadpan. Its architectural implications might seem obvious but it’s such a rich filmic reference. We’ve previously talked about the expectation that as young Black artists you were left to contextualize your work. How important was the ability to speak on or speak for your work at the time?

GL

It’s true and it was intimidating. One thing that Yvonne Rainer spoke about at the ISP that stuck with me was about making your own discourse as an artist. I don’t think she meant it specifically for artists of color, but I think that was particularly true for us. The discourse around Black art, at least in the mainstream press, was so poor. If you didn’t talk about your own work, horrible shit would be said. You had to be corrective in some ways and construct your own narrative. It was imperative.

EO

When did you know that you had to be an architect of your own career? When did you know you needed to place your work in certain places and practice a certain act of refusal and then defend it and then contextualize it? When did all these operations become necessary? The discourse requires tending to, and it doesn’t seem like it’s let up since the beginning.

GL

It’s never let up. But I do think it’s gotten better because there are more scholars in the field who have grown up with the work and have thought about the issues for a very long time. It’s not brand new anymore. I didn’t know until I started reading what was said about my work in art magazines that they didn’t know anything about my work. I realized I couldn’t assume that they would get it or do the work required to understand it. It seemed like a lot of critics felt that all they needed to know was that the work was about identity. They thought that if the artist was Black, then the work was about Black folks and that’s all they needed to know.

EO

What were the driving variables that really propelled your practice? Where were you working from? Was it film and literature mostly?

GL

Literature was a big influence, of course. Thinking about influences isn’t that important to me, because what matters is what you do with them. Literature seemed to be the thing that I could do the most with in a painting practice. Besides, I don’t really understand sculpture, and I don’t really understand video, but I kind of understand painting. But maybe at this point, all these things I don’t understand are just the result of an idiosyncratic refusal. Maybe as an artist you have to imagine the space in your practice for those things to exist, which is why it has taken me a while to make the space for other things to exist in my practice. This is why I always talk about AJ [Arthur Jafa], because I feel like he was able to do that so well.

EO

How does he do it?

GL

It’s a mystery to me. Partially it comes from his skills as a filmmaker, which are easily translatable into gallery and museum spaces, and from his skills as an archivist. Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death is basically just his notebooks.

EO

His notebooks are a kind of a restaging of Toni Morrison’s The Black Book.

GL

In some ways, yes. But I think Toni’s project is different. It’s not exactly a positive image project. It’s certainly about the full complexity of Black experience, but I can’t imagine her trolling the internet for videos of Black people getting shot by the police. She does talk about it, but I can’t imagine she would ever depict it in the way that AJ frames things: his investment is much more ambivalent than I imagine Toni’s investment was.

EO

I want to return to your view on Lorna’s work at the time. What made it fierce?

GL

Lorna’s work operated in a theater of refusal. She presented Black bodies, but they’re all completely unidentifiable. It’s a woman wearing a white shirt. She’s turned away from you or she’s bisected or she’s wearing a mask over her face. You can never see her. She’s a beautiful photographer, but it’s not primarily about that. It doesn’t operate with a sense of the documentary. It’s not like, “I photograph these strong Black women doing whatever.” But it does talk about that stuff in a very complicated, sophisticated way. There’s a piece called Figure. It’s all these plays on the word “figure,” showing the different ways it is used to connote a sense of assumption or presentation. Like “He was disfigured,” or “Figured he was a suspect.” I have a little illustration of that piece pinned up on my wall, and every month or so, I just look at it and think, “I wish I was Lorna.” She plays with the language so beautifully, and that seems very Black to me.

Her work was incredibly topical because it was being shown in the midst of what was happening with the landmark 1991 Senate confirmation hearing to appoint Clarence Thomas as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Anita Hill’s testimony. I was certainly influenced by the work, but I have no idea if it was well received generally.

EO

Was there a general forum where you could convene in order to talk about the work and what you were experiencing?

GL

We’re talking about the early ’90s here. And at that time, there were many different Black art worlds. I remember going to a show that had Lorna’s work in it and meeting a Black curator who seriously asked me, “What does this have to do with Black women and our lives?” I was shocked because it seemed to me to have everything to do with Black women’s lives. I assume she just thought it was too conceptual and not what was needed at that moment. It wasn’t documentary photography, and it wasn’t uplifting.

EO

Was it Daughters of the Dust that we needed?

GL

I think they would say that Daughters of the Dust was what we needed. A Black-centered story, a reclamation of a certain kind of history. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing film. It’s a shame that it didn’t lead to an amazing career for Julie Dash.

EO

What does refusal give you? When you mention the notion of “too conceptual,” I understand the conceptual as a method of defying legibility and practicing refusal. At the same time, it’s a way for you to bridge thought to something that’s still evolving and coming into being.

GL

I think it’s a strategy to say that Blackness as subject matter is inexhaustible. The discourse around it at the time seemed to frame it as a limited subject matter. I think it’s both a way of dealing with that debate, but also a way of dealing with the demand of a kind of Afrocentrism, which is a kind of Black politics that focuses on positive images and keeping the business in house. I think Lorna’s work refused this. I should note that practicing refusal always implies that there is a master narrative that you’re working against. That incessant way of framing is a problem and can be a real danger. It’s related to my retrospective critique of Notes on the Margin of the Black Book: I was still centering Mapplethorpe. But I feel like there are things you have to go through in order to get somewhere else. At that moment, I felt that the image of Black masculinity in Mapplethorpe’s photographs was an impediment that I had to work through. People reacted by saying that I should make my own images of Black men to counteract Mapplethorpe’s if I had a problem with them. But I knew that that wasn’t the point, I was talking about something else.

EO

Work that engages with refusal runs the risk of turning in on itself and just becoming about refusal, and I think the way to get around that is to open it up and broaden the notion of refusal. I think the Mapplethorpe work actually warrants a form of editing. Notes on the Margin of the Black Book seems more about recontextualization and less about the reclamation of some narrative. You’re trying to recontextualize the images and present them with new terms, right?

GL

It’s interesting to me that one of his subjects, Darrel Ellis, is so present now in terms of thinking about what it meant to have been photographed by Mapplethorpe. Indeed, he made work based on the images that were taken of him. Ellis said in the publication attached to the Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing show, “I struggled to resist the frozen images of myself taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar.” He made these watercolor paintings based on Mapplethorpe’s images of him at the same time that I was thinking about Notes on the Margin. They’re a different way of dealing with the feeling of being haunted by Mapplethorpe.

EO

I’ve been thinking about how people don’t really understand what photographers do. When a person takes a photograph of you, it really is a capture. You don’t have autonomy over how that image is displayed and circulates beyond this lifetime. I think that’s what Ellis was working through. He can’t reclaim that image.

GL

Yeah. His work portrays a range of emotions. It’s almost like looking at a contact sheet of moods. In one watercolor, he looks very pensive; in another, he looks pissed off and hard. He shows the range of emotions that he probably went through when he was having the picture taken, which Mapplethorpe’s image just can’t show.

EO

The different stages of grief. This is exactly why I’m interested in the social history of your career, and of every artist’s career, for that matter. Art objects are forever rendered in time and space, but our actual experiences, the ones that drive the production, are what remain unknown. They don’t necessarily cohere or remain legible in the works. Speaking to this history is the other aspect of your career that now requires attention. I’m not trying to suggest some sort of narrative arc over your career because you’re still on the ground. Nevertheless, a lot of time has passed since when you began and now. What’s the difference between your early days as an artist and now?

GL

The difference is the type of discourse that can be had about my kind of work. Now, we all have bodies of work that can be studied and have been studied. I think that the number of platforms that people have created to present ideas is much greater. Following that, the way the work can be talked about on those platforms is much more broad, more interesting, more thought provoking, more useful. There’s also a bigger overlap between scholars and artists. When I had my retrospective at the Whitney over a decade ago, I asked Saidiya Hartman to write an essay for the catalog about slave narratives and runaway posters. I don’t think I knew who Saidiya Hartman really was, but I asked her anyway. Looking back on it now, I feel terrible. Who was I to ask Saidiya Hartman to write an essay about my work? [Laughs.] But I think that kind of thing is more normal now. Exchange between artists and scholars is much more common. Stuart Hall might have been an exception back in the day. He was certainly influential for a lot of artistic practices. He actually appeared in some of Isaac Julien’s work: he did a voiceover for Looking for Langston, and he appeared in The Attendant. That felt new to me back then, but it doesn’t feel so strange to me now. The back and forth between writers, scholars, and artists, feels more normalized. In some ways, I think it’s a great thing.

EO

I think in some ways this was initiated by artists. This happened when Adrian Piper, for example, wrote about her work and the process of making it. She didn’t want to be misperceived and the only way to do that was through contextualizing her work in the larger canon and contemporary history.

GL

I think it’s a tricky thing to have artists write on their own work. It’s one thing to shape a discourse around their work, but it’s another thing to have to write about the work because it can lead to an exhaustion of the work itself. I feel like when I’m asked to write about my own work, I set up an imagined audience that I am explaining the work to. But that’s not really the assignment, even if it might feel like it is. Nobody besides myself is interested in me writing elliptically about my practice. I find writing to be just as hard as making artwork, so I’d much rather just make the work. I don’t say this to be romantic, but I often find that it takes me a while to figure out what my work is about. In some ways, it exceeds what I know. Making work is a way of thinking through something, but the thinking process is not exhausted when the artwork is finished. So I find that when I’m asked to write about my own work, I have to pin down ideas before they are actually fully formed or digested. Ideas are in the work, and they’re not always extractable in writing. I resisted generating discourse around my work because in some ways, I want the work to exist in a way that exceeds my own knowledge.

EO

By not writing about the work, you allow the temporality of its creation to extend beyond when you might say it’s done or when it’s exhibited. I want to know about your relationship to temporality throughout your career.

GL

I think it has changed a lot in the arc of my career. When I think about my earlier work, I’m sort of amazed at how quickly I produced things. For example, the Zora Neale Hurston paintings, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, and the Richard Pryor works, were all produced within the span of three or four years. I don’t think that quickly anymore. I can’t code switch that quickly in my own practice. I give myself more license to let things germinate for a while rather than moving from one thing to the next. I didn’t feel like I was allowed to do that when I was younger, but I’ve finally given myself that license.

I’m also writing about other work more, which has been generative in a way it wasn’t before. Research about other people’s work gives me ideas about my own. I used to think that writing and making artwork were separate things, but now I think they’re closer together. I always thought that reading was generative for things in the studio. Time spent researching and writing has become time in the studio as well.

EO

I can’t let this end without asking you about post-Blackness.

GL

In some ways, it started as a joke. Thelma was telling me the list of artists in a show she was curating, including Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, and others I can’t remember for a show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. I joked, “Oh, all your post-Black children,” and she just ran with it. The comment came from an intuitive understanding that the generation that she was thinking about felt fundamentally different from the previous generation in terms of their investments in abstraction, the breadth of their thinking about Blackness and its representation, and their conviction that nothing was off limits and that there wasn’t a political program to be articulated in their work. The post-Black generation was invested in something entirely different from, say, Kerry James Marshall’s articulation of painting Black figures as a way to compound the complexity of representing Blackness with black pigment. They eschewed the idea that figuring Blackness was needed in museum spaces. But ultimately, I think I said it and it took on a life of its own. It was a good way to begin the discussion around a whole new generation of artists. It helped make certain work by certain artists more legible.