GLENN LIGON: The piece was made using oil paint and enamel paint mixed together. And that’s not a good combination, so the minute I made the painting, it started the crack. And given the subject matter, I thought that was interesting.

I think there’s a distance between the origins of the sign and me as an artist in the late 80s making a painting of that sign. And one of the ways that the distance between one historical moment and another is measured in the painting is by its cracks, the fact that the painting is aging, the fact that the painting is falling apart, which is, for me, about changing notions of what it means to carry a sign that says, I am a man, or what it means to make a painting many, many years later of that sign. To think about history as a process rather than a series of fixed events.