|
click to enlarge any image below:
CONDITION REPORT, 2000
Iris print and iris print with serigraph
32 x 46 inches overall, (2 parts, 32 x 22.75 inches each sheet)
Edition of 20
$10,500. framed
Details of the set. Click to enlarge:
 
SELF PORTRAIT AT 11 YEARS OLD, 2004
Stenciled paper pulp painting
36 x 30 inches
Edition of 20
$7,500.
 
WHITE #1, 1995 (detail at right)
Aquatint etching, 19.5 x 14.5 inches, Edition of 35
$2,000.
|
|
Brooklyn-based artist Glenn Ligon was a Walker
artist-in-residence as part of an exciting initiative funded by the
Pew Charitable Trusts-Artists and Communities at the
Crossroads-which will introduced contemporary artists to Twin Cities
communities.
Ligon is one of today's most prolific artists. Through works that
incorporate the historical with the present and the socially
inflected with the aesthetically complex, he is an artist who
resists easy categorization. He has drawn from sources as varied as
Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Adrian Piper, and Richard Pryor, and from
practices ranging from Conceptual, Pop, and Appropriation Art to
Minimalism. Best known as a painter who uses language as a device
for both image and communication, Ligon addresses issues of identity
and politics through quotations from culturally charged material.
His word paintings excerpt evocative texts by writers such as James
Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston. He has said of his
work that he wants to "make language into a physical thing,
something that has real weight and force to it." The weight of
language is further investigated in his print series such as
Runaways and Narratives, which bring the racialized past into the
present through Ligon's manipulations and updating of 19th-century
runaway slave posters and slave narratives, respectively.
Ligon has continued to work with found texts and images such as
those from the 1995 Million Man March. He is also exploring the
luminescence of black coal dust as a metaphorically charged material
in paintings and drawings. In all his work, Ligon surveys America's
cultural legacies and situates them in contemporary life.
-
text from Walker Art Center
The Detroit Institute of
Arts presented an installation by New York artist Glenn Ligon, who
is widely recognized as one of the most thoughtful and accomplished
young American artists, and the installation, Glenn Ligon: To
Disembark, is adapted from his 1994 solo exhibition at the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.
The installation explores the relationships between history, race
and identity. The variety of media Ligon uses includes wooden
packing crates, recalling the story of a slave who had himself
shipped from Richmond, Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia in 1849;
lithographs imitating 19th-century advertisements for the return of
escaped slaves, each of which names and describes Ligon himself; and
etchings, also referring to the artist, which mimic the
frontispieces of 19th-century narratives in which former slaves
recounted their lives under slavery and stories of their escapes.
|
