His art explores American history, literature, and society through modern painting and conceptual art. Nearly 100 of his pieces adorn the halls of the museum: paintings, prints, photography, drawings, sculptures and neon signs.
Words and names are stenciled on wooden doors or door-shaped canvasses: James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor, Jean Genet, Roger Mapplethorpe and others, aligned symmetrically.
In each painting, a single sentence is repeated over and over. From top to bottom, the sentence becomes smudgy and less legible.
The pieces’ tones run the gamut of comedy, anger, and bemusement as his work explores aesthetic questions related to society, linguistics, racial and gender politics and sexuality.
Many African-Americans can see where his artistic inspiration lies. How work is a reflection of growing up in a family whose members have lived under Jim Crow laws in the South, where they weren’t allowed to share water fountains, movie houses, public restrooms, ballparks, phone booths and other services with white Americans. There is no trickier subject for an artist whose roots materialized under these conditions than to expose, examine and overcome the history of segregation as a demarcation. The dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between the different cultures is honest feeling or pity or pragmatism. But Glenn Ligon’s art transcends that point.
Ligon was born in the Bronx and lived in a housing project. He won a scholarship to Walden, a progressive, arts-focused and predominantly white school in Manhattan. He graduated and went on to study art at the Rhode Island School of Design. And then he transferred to Wesleyan University, where he received his bachelor’s degree. Afterward, he was accepted into the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
The rest is history.
Today his work exudes his experiences as an African-American—one who uses his art as a weapon and sharp metaphor for the obvious: to remind America of its tragic past. And despite the combative questions about his work, there are thoughts of countless Black family reunions which will forever surface like one great collage–one feels at home and at ease with thoughts of hope.
Mitch Ligon is a freelance writer, arts enthusiast, and cousin of Glenn Ligon.
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