Glenn Ligon repeated Zora Neale Hurston's phrase 'How it feels to be colored me' until the letters piled into near-black opacity — Jacobson says she looked at it and immediately understood 'how it feels to be Black. It's complicated. It's messy.'
As heard by us
A warm, plainspoken look at instruction-based art, where scores, scripts, and museum exercises make words the material.
Abbi Jacobson treats instruction-based art as a wonderfully practical problem: if the artwork is a set of directions, who is really making it when someone else carries them out?
Why you'd press play
You want art talk that starts in a MoMA classroom and lands on the bigger idea that words can be art.
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