Glenn Ligon

Renowned multimedia artist Glenn Ligon (US, b. 1960) uses text painting—a genre featuring words on canvas—to challenge constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. The artist came to prominence in the 1990s for stenciling selections from African American literature in stark black letters on white backgrounds. As he moved from painting to sculpture, installation, printmaking, photography, film, and video, Ligon gained a reputation for his insightful commentary on the complexities of American identity. Ligon’s art highlights and challenges the boundaries that separate our internal and external experiences of identity and, in the process, affects the intense emotions associated with the core of who we are.

Education and Early Practice

Ligon was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, and received his BA from Wesleyan University in 1982. Originally interested in abstraction, he began incorporating language into his paintings during his time at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1985. Finding that a strictly abstract style was not suited to the stories he wanted to tell, the artist featured a diversity of voices in his paintings, including Zora Neal Hurston, Walt Whitman, and Richard Pryor. He also encouraged the streaks left behind by oil sticks and stencils to progressively obscure the text on his canvases, experimenting with the subject of legibility and the limits of signs. In the early 2000s, he began using coal dust and black paint to render his literary excerpts, as seen in Untitled (Stranger in the Village #16), so the letters could only be distinguished by their texture.

Works on Canvas and Beyond

A dynamic visual artist, Ligon has continued to explore the relationship between text and image in a variety of mediums, flouting all boundaries in the process. He often uses print media to highlight a particular text or, in the case of the Million Man March series, to create a moment to reflect on the eerie details of a larger image. Ligon also collaborates extensively with other artists, as in his project with Byron Kim. By stenciling a speech by boxer Muhammad Ali onto a punching bag, they ask the viewer to confronting both race and its twin American obsession, masculinity. Throughout his practice, Ligon urges his audiences to consider the depth of multiple meanings behind familiar images, icons, and histories.

At the Walker

During his residency at the Walker Art Center (1999–2000) Ligon turned to the joyful and uninhibited aesthetic of children’s drawings for his inspiration. He copied illustrations from 1970s coloring books featuring images of blackness and black identity onto large sheets of newsprint. They combined pictures of notable figures and icons—Malcolm X, George Washington Carver, and Harriet Tubman among them—with drawings of other black characters engaged in everyday activities. Then, during lively workshops at three daycare centers in Minneapolis, the artist shared these illustrations with a diverse group of children between the ages of three and nine. After they colored the artist’s pages, Ligon collected and reproduced them on large canvases for his painting series called Coloring. In the same residency, Ligon curated a selection of books from the University of Minnesota’s Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature, displayed as part of the exhibition Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present. Content from the pamphlet that accompanied this presentation was recently made into a book by the artist, titled A People on the Cover.

Recognition

Glenn Ligon has had a number of solo exhibitions, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1993), the Brooklyn Museum (1996), the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001), the Guggenheim Museum (2002), the Dia Center for the Arts (2003), the Power Plant, Toronto, (2005), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2011). He has been recognized with a number of grants and awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982, 1989, and 1991), the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1997), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (2009).