Glenn Ligon facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Glenn Ligon
Ligon in 2014
Born	1960 (age 64–65) The Bronx, New York City, U.S.
Education	Wesleyan University
Known for	Conceptual art

Glenn Ligon (born in 1960, pronounced Lie-gōne) is an American conceptual artist. This means he creates art that focuses on ideas and messages more than just how it looks. His artwork explores important topics like race, language, and identity.

Glenn Ligon lives in New York City. His art often uses words and ideas from famous writers and speakers like James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston. He is also known for helping to create the idea of "Post-Blackness," which talks about new ways of thinking about Black identity in art and culture.

Early Life and Career

Glenn Ligon was born in 1960 in the Bronx, New York. When he was seven, his parents helped him and his younger brother get scholarships to a good private school in Manhattan called Walden School.

Ligon later studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and then at Wesleyan University, where he earned his degree in 1982. In 1985, he also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

After college, he worked as a proofreader, checking legal documents for mistakes. In his free time, he painted in a style called Abstract Expressionism. This style uses colors and shapes to show feelings, like the art of Jackson Pollock.

In the mid-1980s, Ligon started adding text and words to his paintings. He wanted to use his art to share his ideas about racial identity and political issues. Many of the words he used came from important African-American writers.

Ligon became well-known in the early 1990s, along with other artists like Lorna Simpson. He still lives and works in New York City.

Personal Life

Glenn Ligon lives in Tribeca, a neighborhood in New York City. He has served on the boards of several art foundations, including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He also has a studio in Brooklyn, near his artist friends Paul Ramirez Jonas and Byron Kim.

Glenn Ligon's Artworks

Ligon creates art using many different materials. He makes paintings, neon signs, videos, and photographs. His art is deeply shaped by his experiences as a gay African American man living in the United States.

Text-Based Paintings

Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

Even though Ligon works with many materials, painting is still very important to him. He often puts words and phrases into his paintings. He uses stencils to hand-paint quotes, jokes, or parts of books onto the canvas. These words often come from sources that talk about the lives of Black Americans throughout history.

In 1990, Ligon had his first solo art show called "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." This show made him famous for his large paintings that repeat a phrase over and over. As the words are repeated, they often get smudged and layered, making them harder to read.

One of his first text-based works was Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988). This painting is a new version of the signs carried during the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968. These signs became famous from Ernest Withers's photographs of the march. In other paintings, Ligon layers repeating text until it's almost impossible to read. This makes viewers look closely to try and understand the hidden words.

His Prologue Series #2 (1991) uses the first words of Ralph Ellison's book Invisible Man. The words are stenciled in different shades of black and gray, becoming less clear as they go down the painting. He uses the same words in Prologue Series #5 (1991), making them even harder to read.

In 1993, Ligon started a series of paintings based on the comedy routines of Richard Pryor from the 1970s.

Stranger #21 (2005), from the Stranger series, at the Rubell Museum DC in 2022

In his Stranger series, Ligon explores ideas from James Baldwin's 1953 essay Stranger in the Village. This series began in 1996, using parts of the essay that slowly become harder to read as they are stenciled onto the canvas. In 2021, Ligon showed the entire essay in large text paintings.

Glenn Ligon's Debris Field series started with etchings in 2012 and became paintings in 2018. These paintings also use stencils, but they don't use words from books or speeches. Instead, the Debris Field series uses stencils of letters that Ligon created himself. The letters are placed all over the canvas, stacking and layering. This continues Ligon's interest in how clear words are and the mix between clear images and abstract art.

To Disembark (1993) and Runaways (1993)

In 1993, Ligon's show To Disembark was displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The show's title comes from a poetry book by Gwendolyn Brooks. This exhibition connected the history of American slavery to unfair treatment today. It showed how African Americans are still dealing with the effects of slavery and racism.

In the main artwork of the show, Untitled (To Disembark) (1993), Ligon made packing crates. These crates were like the one described by Henry "Box" Brown, an enslaved person who escaped slavery by mailing himself in a box from Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia. Ligon made nine crates and placed them around the gallery. He also added sound to the crates. Each crate played a different sound, like a heartbeat, a spiritual song, or modern rap music. This included songs like "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday and "Sound of da Police" by KRS-one. The mix of songs from different times created a "chorus" that showed how slavery's effects have lasted through history.

Runaways (1993) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

Another artwork in this show was Runaways (1993), a set of 10 prints. Ligon asked his friends to describe him. He then used these descriptions as text on posters that looked like old "runaway slave" ads from the 1800s. These ads were used to try and get enslaved people back.

In another part of the exhibition, Ligon stenciled four quotes from a 1928 essay by Zora Neale Hurston called "How It Feels To Be Colored Me" directly onto the walls. One quote was: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Ligon found Hurston's ideas helpful because she explored how race is shaped by situations, not just by who someone is.

Coloring Book Series

Another series of Ligon's large paintings is based on children's coloring books from the 1970s that featured important Black history figures. This series began when Ligon was an artist at the Walker Art Museum in 1999-2000. There, he worked with schoolchildren who colored pages from these old coloring books. Ligon then used these colored pages to create his own paintings and drawings. Figures like Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and Issac Hayes appear in these artworks.

Neon Artworks

Warm Broad Glow II (2011) at the Whitney Museum in 2011

Since 2005, Ligon has created art using neon lights. His first neon piece, Warm Broad Glow (2005), uses words from the 1909 novel Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. Ligon made the words "negro sunshine" in warm white neon, then painted the front of the letters black. This piece was shown at the Whitney Museum in 2011. Other neon works are inspired by sculptures from artist Bruce Nauman. For example, One Live and Die (2006) comes from Nauman's 100 Live and Die (1984).

Ligon's large artwork A Small Band (2015) has three neon pieces that light up the words "blues," "blood," and "bruise." This work was first made for the Venice Biennale, a big art show in Italy. The three words in A Small Band refer to a 1966 sound piece by composer Steve Reich called Come Out. Reich's piece used a recording of Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, a group of young Black men wrongly accused of murder in the 1960s.

Double America (2012) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

Ligon has also created other large neon artworks. Des Parisiens Noirs (2019) is an artwork that shows the names of 13 Black models from famous historical paintings. It was displayed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. This project was part of an exhibition that focused on Black models in art whose stories were often forgotten. One of the names in Ligon's neon work is "nom inconnu," which means "name unknown," to remember models whose names are still a mystery.

In 2021, Ligon created Waiting for the Barbarians for an exhibition in Athens, Greece. This artwork uses the last two lines of a 1904 poem by C. P. Cavafy. These lines, in one translation, say: "Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." Ligon's neon artwork shows nine different English translations of these lines. This shows how different translations can change the meaning and how the idea of "barbarians" was used to make some groups seem like "others." With Cavafy's words, Ligon talks about how some cultures see themselves as better than others and how this idea of "othering" might be changing.

The Death of Tom (2008)

In 2008, Ligon made a short film called The Death of Tom. It is based on Thomas Edison's 1903 silent film about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ligon filmed himself acting out the last scene of Edison's movie. However, the film was loaded incorrectly into the camera, so no clear pictures appeared. Ligon decided to show his film anyway, as an abstract mix of light and shadow. The story is told through music, composed and played by jazz musician Jason Moran.

Exhibitions

In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a big show of Ligon's work called Glenn Ligon: America. This show traveled to other museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Other important recent shows include Grief and Grievance (2021) at the New Museum, where Ligon helped plan the exhibition. He also had a show called Des Parisiens Noirs at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (2019). Ligon's art has been shown in major international exhibitions like the Venice Biennale and Documenta XI.

Notable Works in Public Collections

In 2012, Ligon was asked to create the first special artwork for the New School's University Center building in New York City. This artwork, For Comrades and Lovers (2015), uses about 400 feet of text from Walt Whitman's poem Leaves of Grass. The words are made of violet neon light and run along the top of a wall in the building's café.

Recognition and Awards

Glenn Ligon has received many awards for his art.

• In 2003, he won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
• In 2005, he received an Alphonse Fletcher Foundation Fellowship.
• In 2006, he was given the Skowhegan Medal for Painting.
• In 2009, he won the Studio Museum's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize.
• In 2010, he received a United States Artists Fellow award.

In 2009, President Barack Obama added Ligon's 1992 painting Black Like Me No. 2 to the White House collection. It was placed in the President's private living area. The words in this painting come from John Howard Griffin's 1961 book Black Like Me. This book tells the story of a white man who traveled through the American South after making his skin look darker. In Ligon's painting, the words "All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence" are repeated and overlap until they become a field of black paint.

In 2018, Ligon received an Honorary Doctorate from The New School. In 2021, he was chosen as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

See Also

• African-American art
• African-American literature
• Conceptual art
• Glenn Ligon at the Minneapolis Institute of Art