Glenn Ligon

If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.

Claudia Rankine's book-length poem 'Citizen' was nominated for National Book Critics Circle awards in the categories of poetry and criticism. It is one of the most devastating takes on American culture I have read in a long time, laying bare the stakes of being black in a country long ambivalent about our presence here.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

So much of my work has been about disappearing.

Much of my work is engaged with 'America' - the idea of America.

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.

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.

A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.