Glenn Ligon

Although Ligon's work spans sculptures, prints, drawings, mixed media and neon signs, painting remains a core activity. Highly influenced by wide reading, 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.[9] His source materials concern issues of the lives of black Americans throughout history, often alluding to other prominent black figures.

In 1989, he mounted his first solo show, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," in Brooklyn.[1] 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, eventually dissipating into murk. 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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12]

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.[8] In 1993, Ligon began the first of three series of gold-colored paintings based on Richard Pryor's groundbreaking stand-up comedy routines from the 1970s. The scatological and racially charged jokes which Ligon depicts are expressed in the vernacular language of the street and reveal a complex vision of black culture.[13]

In 1993, Ligon's show To Disembark was released. This show commented on the linkage between slavery of the past and the time's racial injustices. Ligon was inspired by historical moments throughout slavery, and was specifically inspired by the story of Henry "Box" Brown. Brown was a slave who literally shipped himself from Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia via a box crate.[14] Much of To Disembark centers around the crates that Ligon has constructed and are 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.[14] The juxtaposition of these two songs, one released in the early 1900s and the other the early 2000s, is a comment on although many years have passed, but the struggle is still present. "Strange Fruit" has been used by other black artists such as Hank Willis Thomas in his photography series of the same name.

In Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991-1993), Ligon reacts to Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of black male bodies from his 1996 book titled, Black Book. Ligon separately framed 91 erotic photographs of black males cut from Robert Mapplethorpe's 1988 Black Book, 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.[15] Ligon explicitly points out the problematics 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 the scope under which they were viewed. Ligon, however, made these pictures public literally in how they were present, in a museum, but also through how they were viewed. Ligon forced viewers to look at these images in a room full of others.[16] This brings forward the uncomfortability of viewing such images publicly, and allows for open discussion of them. It was this show that quickly led Ligon into Feast of Scraps.

In A Feast of Scraps (1994–98), he inserted pornographic and stereotypical photographs of black men, 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. Ligon uses this sort of imagery to subvert the stereotype of the black American family, as well as express part of his own sexuality. In this sense, 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.[17] The imagery causes the viewer to imagine the identity and narrative of those depicted in these photographs, as well as recognize their own internalized perceptions of the black American family.[17] This project draws from the secret histories and submerged meanings of inherited texts and images.[1]

Another series of large paintings was based on children's coloring and additions to drawings of iconic figures in 1970s black-history coloring books.[18]

In 1994, Ligon's art installation To Disembark was shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The title alludes to the title of a book of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks. To Disembark functions in both works to evoke the recognition that African Americans are still coping with the remnants of slavery and its manifestation in racism.[19] In one part of the installation, Ligon created a series of packing crates modeled on 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. Each crate played a different sound, such as a heartbeat, a spiritual, or contemporary rap music. Around each box, the artist placed posters in which he characterized himself, in words and period images, as a runaway slave in the style of 19th-century broadsheets circulated to advertise for the return of fugitive slaves.[19] 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.[19]

Since 2005, Ligon has made neon works. Warm Broad Glow (2005), Ligon's first exploration in neon, uses a fragment of text from Three Lives, the 1909 novel by American author Gertrude Stein. Ligon rendered the words "negro sunshine" in warm white neon, the letters of which were then painted black on the front.[20] In 2008, the piece was selected to participate in the Renaissance Society's group exhibit, Black Is, Black Ain't.[21] It was installed on the Whitney Museum's facade in 2011.[22] Other neon works are derived from neon sculptures by Bruce Nauman. One Live and Die (2006) stems from Nauman's 100 Live and Die (1984), for example.[20]

Ligon's large-scale installation A Small Band consists of three neon pieces illuminating the words "blues," "blood," and "bruise." Commissioned for the facade of the Central Pavilion at the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale, the work has been subsequently arranged in a new, site-specific formations at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, Illinois, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. The three words of A Small Band reference composer Steve Reich's 1966 sound piece Come Out, which looped a fragment of the recorded testimony of Daniel Hamm, who was one of the Harlem Six, a group of young black men wrongly accused and convicted of murder in the mid-1960s.

In 2009, Ligon completed a short film entitled "The Death of Tom." It is based on Thomas Edison's 1903 silent film Uncle Tom's Cabin. Playing the character of Tom, Ligon had himself filmed re-creating the last scene of Edison's movie, from which he took his title. But the film was incorrectly loaded in the hand-crank camera that the artist used, so no imagery appeared on film. Embracing this apparent failure, Ligon decided to show his film as an abstract progression of lights and darks with a narrative suggested by the score composed and played by jazz musician Jason Moran.[2]