I should say at this point that I was working in a studio that was a vocational school at the time, and my studio at the time was loaded down with all these huge chalkboards. And to work on one wall I [would] have to work from one side of the room to the other, and I'd move these chalkboards. At the time, I was doing all this other process work, like the filings and that, and through conversation with some relatives who were from overseas, we were discussing kinds of histories and how histories were formed, how you get to understand them. And for me, it's become clear that in American educational systems you weren't really getting a very broad-based understanding of history; it was [a] very directed kind of way of understanding American history. And this cousin of mine [who] was [living] overseas was...[learning] European [history], women's history, people of color, things like that, and I thought this was very interesting that we weren't getting that in my public school...So I thought, "Well, how am I going to import this idea of this personal kind of understanding of education into the work?" and so I was looking for a kind of loaded object, and the chalkboard, which I was moving back and forth around the room, became the kind of obvious object for me. It sort of just hit me like a club on the head one day. So I started these chalkboard pieces, which I think were probably [derived from] Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black paintings and some of Franz Kline's paintings and things like that. I was really drawn into black-on-black surface, some Rothko's and things like that. So in this piece, I took an actual chalkboard and cut it up into this paragraph which created these assumed word forms. They were kind of inspired by government letters and things like that, where things are censored; so I thought: "What an interesting way to throw a read onto education.

©1999 The Museum of Modern Art, New York