Glenn Ligon paints the same sentence over and over until it stops being readable, using the slow collapse of language into abstraction to ask hard questions about race, sexuality and American identity.
Working chiefly in oil stick and stencil, he takes lines from Black writers including James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston and repeats them down the canvas, letting the letters smear and darken until legibility gives way to mere texture.
Ligon has extended the same interest in appropriated text into neon, photography and an extensive print practice. He’s widely regarded as one of his generation’s most significant conceptual artists working with language.
Working chiefly in oil stick and stencil, he takes lines from Black writers including James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston and repeats them down the canvas, letting the letters smear and darken until legibility gives way to mere texture.
Ligon has extended the same interest in appropriated text into neon, photography and an extensive print practice. He’s widely regarded as one of his generation’s most significant conceptual artists working with language.
Summary
Glenn Ligon paints the same sentence over and over until it stops being readable, using the slow collapse of language into abstraction to ask hard questions about race, sexuality and American identity.
Working chiefly in oil stick and stencil, he takes lines from Black writers including James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston and repeats them down the canvas, letting the letters smear and darken until legibility gives way to mere texture.
Ligon has extended the same interest in appropriated text into neon, photography and an extensive print practice. He’s widely regarded as one of his generation’s most significant conceptual artists working with language.
Working chiefly in oil stick and stencil, he takes lines from Black writers including James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston and repeats them down the canvas, letting the letters smear and darken until legibility gives way to mere texture.
Ligon has extended the same interest in appropriated text into neon, photography and an extensive print practice. He’s widely regarded as one of his generation’s most significant conceptual artists working with language.
Artworks by Glenn Ligon
About Glenn Ligon
Biography
About Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon was born in 1960 and raised in public housing in the Bronx, New York. He earned a degree from Wesleyan University in 1982 and following early experiments in abstraction, took part in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in 1985. Here, he began incorporating text into his paintings for the first time.
Text until it breaks
Ligon's breakthrough came with Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), a stencilled quotation from Zora Neale Hurston repeated across a found door until the letters cramp and dissolve into one another.
A related early work, Untitled (I Am a Man), reproduces a placard carried by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, but stripped of the historical context that gave the phrase its force. Ligon achieves the smeared, half-legible surface of these paintings using an oil stick pressed through a stencil, a technique that reveals its own instability the more closely the text is read.
Text into print
Printmaking has run through Ligon's career alongside painting, sculpture, photography and neon. His End of Year Reports recreate his own childhood report cards, while Self Portrait at Eleven Years Old features a portrait of Stevie Wonder using stencilled paper pulp and hand papermaking.
Across his prints, Ligon has worked in stencil, etching, lithography, photogravure and screenprint, often choosing whichever process best exposes the friction in his source material rather than settling on one signature technique.
Biography
About Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon was born in 1960 and raised in public housing in the Bronx, New York. He earned a degree from Wesleyan University in 1982 and following early experiments in abstraction, took part in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in 1985. Here, he began incorporating text into his paintings for the first time.
Text until it breaks
Ligon's breakthrough came with Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), a stencilled quotation from Zora Neale Hurston repeated across a found door until the letters cramp and dissolve into one another.
A related early work, Untitled (I Am a Man), reproduces a placard carried by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, but stripped of the historical context that gave the phrase its force. Ligon achieves the smeared, half-legible surface of these paintings using an oil stick pressed through a stencil, a technique that reveals its own instability the more closely the text is read.
Text into print
Printmaking has run through Ligon's career alongside painting, sculpture, photography and neon. His End of Year Reports recreate his own childhood report cards, while Self Portrait at Eleven Years Old features a portrait of Stevie Wonder using stencilled paper pulp and hand papermaking.
Across his prints, Ligon has worked in stencil, etching, lithography, photogravure and screenprint, often choosing whichever process best exposes the friction in his source material rather than settling on one signature technique.