Prints
About
“[I want to] make language into a physical thing, something that has real weight and force to it.”
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art.
He is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the influential writings and speech of 20th-century cultural figures including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective, America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important solo exhibitions include Post-Noir, Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); Call and Response, Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); and Some Changes, The Power Plant Center for Contemporary Art, Toronto (traveled internationally) (2005). Select curatorial projects include Grief and Grievance, New Museum, New York (2021); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2017); and Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool (2015). Ligon’s work has been shown in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2019, 2011), and Documenta XI (2002). A forthcoming solo exhibition and curatorial project entitled Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place will open at The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, England in September 2024.
Ligon’s work is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His awards and honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. Most recently, Ligon was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
—text from the artist’s website
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
Photogravure etching
24 x 36 inches
Edition of 35
SOLD