Glenn Ligon (born 1960, pronounced Lie-gōne) is an American conceptual artist whose work explores race, language, desire, sexuality, and identity.Meyer, Richard. "Glenn Ligon", in George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (eds), Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Based in New York City, Ligon's work often draws on 20th century literature and speech of 20th century cultural figures such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. He is noted as one of the originators of the term Post-Blackness.
Early life and career Ligon was born in 1960 in the Forest Houses Projects in the south Morrisania, Bronx. When he was seven, his divorced, working-class parents were able to get scholarships for him and his older brother to attend Walden School, a high-quality, progressive, private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side.Hunter Drohojowska-Philp (December 11, 2009), "Glenn Ligon gets Obama's vote", Los Angeles Times. Ligon enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he spent two years before transferring to Wesleyan University. He graduated from Wesleyan with a B.A. in 1982.
After graduating, he worked as a proofreader for a law firm, while in his spare time he painted, working in the abstract Expressionist style of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. In 1985, he participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program.Glenn Ligon , Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York. He continues to live and work in New York City.Glenn Ligon , Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica.
While he started his career as an abstract painter, he began to introduce text and words into his work during the mid-1980s in order to better express his political concerns and ideas about racial identity. Most of the text that he used came from prominent African-American writers (James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison).
Ligon gained prominence in the early 1990s, along with a generation of artists including Janine Antoni, Renée Green, Marlon Riggs, Gary Simmons, and Lorna Simpson.
Personal life Ligon lives in Tribeca.Hilarie M. Sheets (January 26, 2017), "For Glenn Ligon, Home Is Where History and Friends Are Inspirations" The New York Times. He has served on the board of directors of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA).Foundation for Contemporary Arts Announces 2012 Grants to Artists Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA), press release of January 2012. He currently serves on the Board of directors for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (), The Pulitzer Foundation (), and LAXART (). His Brooklyn studio is near where artist friends Paul Ramirez Jonas and Byron Kim also work.
Work Ligon works in multiple media, including painting, neon, video, and photography-based works. His work is greatly informed by his experiences as a gay African American manCarol Vogel (February 24, 2011), "The Inside Story on Outsiderness" , The New York Times. living in the United States.
Text-based Works
Although Ligon's work spans sculptures, prints, drawings, mixed media and neon, painting remains a core activity. He has incorporated texts into his paintings, in the form of literary fragments, jokes, and evocative quotes from a selection of authors, which he stencils directly onto the canvas by hand.Glenn Ligon, Stranger #44 (2011) , Artists for Haiti, September 22, 2011, Christie's New York. These works usually feature a white or grey-toned ground, sometimes tinted with pigment. Ligon uses oil stick to transfer the words onto the surface. His source materials concern issues of the lives of black Americans throughout history.
In 1990, he mounted his first solo show, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," in Brooklyn. This show established Ligon's reputation for creating large, text-based paintings in which a phrase chosen from literature or other sources is repeated continuously. Smudges and streaks from stenciled text layer until the repeated lines become obscured. Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988), a reinterpretation of the signs carried during the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968 — made famous by Ernest Withers's photographs of the march — is the first example of his use of text.Carol Vogel (November 15, 2012), "National Gallery of Art Acquires Glenn Ligon Painting" , The New York Times, November 16, 2012. In several other paintings, he overlaps repeating text to a point of illegibility, demanding the viewer's attention as they try to make out the obscured words. Ligon's Prologue Series #2 (1991) includes the opening text of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, stenciled in various shades of black and grey, the words becoming less discernible as they progress towards the bottom of the composition. He uses this same passage of text in Prologue Series #5 (1991), but obscures the words further, creating a further sense of abstraction and ambiguity about the subject.
In 1993, Ligon began his series of paintings based on Richard Pryor's groundbreaking stand-up comedy routines from the 1970s.
In Ligon's Stranger series, he pursues a career long exploration of paintings based on James Baldwin's 1953 essay Stranger in the Village. This series began in 1996 with selected excepts rendered in Ligon's stenciling technique that gradually reduces the legibility of the text on the canvas. In 2021, Ligon culminates this series by presenting the essay in full in large scale text-based paintings.
Glenn Ligon's Debris Field series began with etchings in 2012. In 2018 he extended this series to paintings. These paintings are also made with stencils but they do not reference pre-existing texts, literature, or speech acts from cultural figures directly. Instead the Debris Field series uses stencils of letterforms that Ligon has created. The letterforms are arranged in all-over compositions on the canvas. Though recognizable as letters, the stenciled shapes also stack and layer on the canvas, furthering Ligon's career long engagement with issues of legibility, and tension between figuration and abstraction.
To Disembark (1993) and Runaways (1993) In 1993, Ligon's To Disembark was presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The title references the title of a book of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks. This show connected the legacy of American slavery to current racial injustices and evoked the recognition that African Americans are still coping with the remnants of slavery and its manifestation in racism.Kimberly Connor. Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition. University of Illinois Press, 2000. In the titular work of the exhibition Untitled (To Disembark) from 1993, Ligon created a series of packing crates modeled after the one described by ex-slave Henry "Box" Brown in his Narrative of Henry Box Brown who escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Brown was a slave who escaped slavery by shipping himself from Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia via a box crate. To Disembark the exhibition centers around nine crates that Ligon constructed and dispersed throughout the gallery. Ligon also took note of how Brown was allegedly singing when he arrived in Philadelphia. To incorporate this element, Ligon placed speakers inside the crates quietly playing songs such as "Strange Fruit" sung by Billie Holiday and "Sound of da Police" by KRS-one. Each crate played a different sound, such as a heartbeat, a spiritual, or contemporary rap music. The juxtaposition of all of the songs, spanning a century, is an auditory element which creates a chorus across time, further exposing the lasting effects of slavery. "Strange Fruit" has been used by other black artists such as Hank Willis Thomas in his photography series of the same name.
Also included in this exhibition is Runaways (1993) a suite of 10 lithographs. Ligon asked friends to describe him and then included these descriptions as text in a series of posters depicting himself as a runaway slave in the style of 19th-century broadsheets circulated to advertise for the return of fugitive slaves.
In another part of the exhibition, Ligon stenciled four quotes from a 1928 Zora Neale Hurston essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me", directly on the walls: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," "I remember the very day that I became colored," "I am not tragically colored," and "I do not always feel colored." Ligon found Hurston's writing illuminating because she explores the idea of race as a concept that is structured by context rather than essence.
Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–1993) In Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–1993), Ligon addresses Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of black men from his 1996 book titled, Black Book. Ligon cut pages from Black Book and framed 91 photographs, installing them in two horizontal rows. Between them are two more rows of small framed typed texts, 78 comments on sexuality, race, AIDS, art and the controversy over Mapplethorpe's work that was launched by then-Texas Congressman Dick Armey.Christopher Knight (October 24, 2011), Art review: 'Glenn Ligon: America' at LACMA Los Angeles Times. Ligon explicitly points out the problems of these visuals in Mapplethorpe's book with his row of textual placards between the rows of photographs. These images, because they were first published in Mapplethorpe's book, had a limited scope under which they were viewed. Ligon, however, made these pictures public in presentation, in a museum: Ligon forced viewers to look at these images in a room full of others. This act allows for open discussion of the images and the politics surrounding them.
Feast of Scraps (1994–1998) In A Feast of Scraps (1994–1998), he inserted images of black men sourced from pornographic magazines, complete with invented captions ("mother knew," "I fell out" "It's a process") into albums of family snapshots including graduation photographs, vacation snapshots, pictures of baby showers, birthday celebrations, and baptisms. Some of the latter photos include the artist's own family. Photography is used as a way of representing multiple identities through the disruption of images, which expresses the fragmentation of black identity, specifically the artist's own identity. Ligon acknowledges that sexuality is something that is not necessarily visible, so it can be erased in photographs such as photos from his teenage years. The imagery causes the viewer to imagine other aspects of identity and narrative of those depicted in these photographs. This project draws from the secret histories and submerged meanings of inherited texts and images.
Coloring book series Another series of large paintings is based on children's coloring on drawings of iconic figures in 1970s black-history coloring books.Saltz, Jerry, "Art: Sign of Life," New York, March 14–21, 2011 page 148 This series began when Ligon was an artist in residence at the Walker Art Museum in 1999–2000. There he worked with school children to color on the pages of found coloring books. The resulting works are a series of paintings and drawings made with silkscreen and paint on canvas and paper that are renderings of the children's interventions. Figures such as Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and Isaac Hayes are depicted in these works.
Neons