Glenn Ligon

In Ligon's Stranger series, he pursues a career long exploration of paintings based on James Balwin's 1953 essay Stranger in the Village.

Glenn Ligon (born 1960, pronounced Lie-gōne) is an American conceptual artist whose work explores race, language, desire, sexuality, and identity.

Based in New York City, Ligon's work often draws on 20th century literature and speech of 20th century cultural figures such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor.

He is noted as one of the originators of the term Post-Blackness.

Ligon was born in 1960 in the Forest Houses Projects in the south Bronx.

When he was seven, his divorced, working-class parents were able to get scholarships for him and his older brother to attend Walden School, a high-quality, progressive, private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Ligon enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he spent two years before transferring to Wesleyan University.

While he started his career as an abstract painter, he began to introduce text and words into his work during the mid-1980s in order to better express his political concerns and ideas about racial identity.

Most of the text that he used came from prominent African-American writers (James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison).

He graduated from Wesleyan with a B.A. in 1982.

Ligon attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1985.

After graduating, he worked as a proofreader for a law firm, while in his spare time he painted, working in the abstract Expressionist style of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

In 1985, he participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program.

He continues to live and work in New York City.

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.

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.

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.

Ligon lives in Tribeca.

He has served on the board of directors of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA).

He currently serves on the Board of directors for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Pulitzer Foundation, and LAXART.

His Brooklyn studio is near where artist friends Paul Ramirez Jonas and Byron Kim also work.

Ligon works in multiple media, including painting, neon, video, and photography based works.

His work is greatly informed by his experiences as a gay African American man living in the United States.

Although Ligon's work spans sculptures, prints, drawings, mixed media and neon, painting remains a core activity.

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.

His source materials concern issues of the lives of black Americans throughout history.

In 1990, he mounted his first solo show, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," in Brooklyn.

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.

Smudges and streaks from stenciled text layer until the repeated lines become obscured.

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.

In 1993, Ligon began his series of paintings based on Richard Pryor's groundbreaking stand-up comedy routines from the 1970s.

This series began in 1996 with selected excepts rendered in Ligon's stenciling technique that gradually reduces the legibility of the text on the canvas.

In 2021, Ligon culminates this series by presenting the essay in full in large scale text-based paintings.

Glenn Ligon's Debris Field series began with etchings in 2012.

In 2018 he extended this series to paintings.

These paintings are also made with stencils but they do not reference pre-existing texts, literature, or speech acts from cultural figures directly.

Instead the Debris Field series uses stencils of letterforms that Ligon has created.

The letterforms are arranged in all-over compositions on the canvas.

Though recognizable as letters, the stenciled shapes also stack and layer on the canvas, furthering Ligon's career long engagement with issues of legibility, and tension between figuration and abstraction.