Glenn Ligon

This long-awaited and essential volume collects writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose canonical paintings, neons and installations have been delivering a cutting examination of race, history, sexuality and culture in America since his emergence in the late 1980s. No stranger to text, the artist has routinely utilized writings from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor, Gertrude Stein and others to construct work that centers Blackness within the historically white backdrop of the art world and culture writ large. Ligon began writing in the early 2000s, engaging deeply with the work of peers such as Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili and Lorna Simpson, as well as with artists who came before him, among them Philip Guston, David Hammons and Andy Warhol. Interweaving a singular voice and a magical knack for storytelling with an astute view of art history and broader cultural shifts, this collection cements Ligon’s status as one of the great chroniclers of our time.
Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx in 1960. He began as an abstract painter but shifted to text-based works which often incorporate quotes from Black authors. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

For four decades, New York–based artist Glenn Ligon (born 1960) has explored America’s literature and fraught racial history through works in a few signature mediums such as text-based paintings and neon. This volume, through studio documentation and a new text by fellow artist and New Yorker Gregg Bordowitz, focuses on various aspects of Ligon’s art-making. Glenn Ligon features newer works by the artist, such as a monumental new painting from Ligon’s ongoing Stranger in the Village series, begun in 1997. In the series, Ligon renders excerpts from novelist James Baldwin’s 1953 essay of the same name, which describes the writer’s experiences as an African American in a small town in Switzerland. Measuring 45 feet long, this triptych will mark the first time Ligon has used the entire text from Baldwin’s essay in a single work.

New York-based Glenn Ligon (born 1960) is one of the most prominent and influential artists working today, in addition to being a writer and a curator. Over the course of his career, he has become known for his critical explorations of American history and society through text-based paintings, sculptures and films.This new series continues his ongoing interrogation into history, language and cultural identity by way of previous processes expanded by the artist. Featuring exhibition installation images as well as historical works, this publication includes an essay by Helen Molesworth, poems by Robin Coste Lewis and a conversation between Ligon and Hamza Walker that took place at Regen Projects in February 2019.

In this artist project, Glenn Ligon traces the representation of black people in the United States on book covers, highlighting the deliberate use of typography, photography and graphics.

Best known for appropriating imagery and text from popular culture, Ligon has selected over 50 book covers – by both lesser-known and seminal authors such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison – to explore a rich and complex set of histories and representations.

Spanning the twentieth century and grouped thematically, the covers reveal correspondences between the past and the present, as well as links between the social and visual constructs of race, beauty and the body.

To introduce the book, an essay by Ligon identifies one of the foundation stones of his life and work: the act of reading.

American artist Glenn Ligon’s latest monumental screen-printed paintings draw upon Minimalist composer Steve Reich’s taped-speech work Come Out.

Ligon’s series recontextualises the phrase ‘Come out to show them’ from the testimony of one of the badly beaten Harlem Six, which Reich isolated for his 1966 work. Whilst Reich repeats the refrain on two channels that gradually become out of sync, Ligon continually superimposes the words onto the canvas to form densely layered landscapes of text. Echoing Reich's music, the artist increases the number of silkscreen layers in each painting until the words verge on abstraction.

Bringing together illustrations of new studies and paintings originally exhibited at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, an essay by Megan Ratner examines the relationship between the paintings, the phrase and history.