Renée Green, Lesson

Renée Green: I’ve had a very long relationship with painting. I'm 61, I grew up in Cleveland and I was taken to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I had a lot of opportunities to look at the collection.

Narrator: Renée Green made Lesson when she was a resident at the Studio Museum in 1989, just before she participated at the Whitney's Independent Study Program.

Renée Green: I went to the Whitney program in 1989. It was fall of ‘89 to spring 1990. This was a time of transitioning forms. And that's part of why I mention this work. It's called Lesson. It’s trying to combine almost like a critique of museums and collection, because it has this collection that's included in it itself. It's not representative of anything else really. But it also has these elements that are quotations from novels. So from Jules Verne, there’s a quotation that has to do with something being destroyed when it was in the process of being collected.

Something I've been thinking about a lot has to do with language and how language is brought into my work, and how it's always been there. I don't think of the painting in isolation, that's the thing. I see it more as a prompt in relation to new works and other works that I've made or that I make that I'm in the process of making. 

Narrator: In that sense, Green’s Space Poem, text on colored banners hanging in the Lobby, is conceptually related in her mind to this painting and to her overall trajectory as an artist.