Glenn Ligon, Untitled, 2016, From a suite of 17 archival pigment prints, Edition of 5 and 1 artist's proof, 71 x 49 inches.
Image via luhringaugustine.com.
What We Said The Last Time
February 27 - April 2, 2016
LUHRING AUGUSTINE
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY
From luhringaugustine.com:
Luhring Augustine is pleased to present What We Said The Last Time, an exhibition of new work by Glenn Ligon, and Entanglements, a curatorial project by the artist. A companion exhibition entitled We Need To Wake Up Cause That’s What Time It Is opened at Luhring Augustine Bushwick on January 16th and remains on view through April 17, 2016.
What We Said The Last Time features a suite of seventeen archival pigment prints that document the paint-spattered pages of the artist’s well-worn copy of James Baldwin’s seminal 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village.” Written during a stay in a remote Swiss mountain hamlet, Baldwin’s text examines complex and urgent questions around blackness, culture, and history. Since 1996, Ligon has used the essay as the basis of his “Stranger” series, including prints, drawings, and dense paintings made with oil stick and often coal dust that oscillate between legibility and obscurity. While creating these canvases, Ligon kept pages of Baldwin’s essay on his studio table for reference, and over the years they became covered with random smudges of black paint, oil stains, and fingerprints. Intrigued by this accumulation of marks, Ligon transformed the book pages into a suite of large-scale prints, using the full text of the essay for the first time in his career. The resulting work is a palimpsest of accumulated personal histories that suggests Ligon’s long engagement with Baldwin’s essay, as well as a new strategy in his ongoing exploration of the interplay between language and abstraction.
Also on view is Entanglements, a curatorial project by Ligon that examines how artists use the studio as a base from which to engage momentous cultural shifts and political events in both direct and oblique ways. Key to the exhibition is Bruce Nauman’s Violin Tuned D.E.A.D. (1969), a video that presents the artist repetitively playing a single note on a violin with his back to the camera. While discussions of Nauman’s video works from this period have focused on issues of performativity, endurance, and the body, Ligon was interested in how Nauman’s discordant note can be heard as a soundtrack to the war in Vietnam or the brutal violence faced by civil rights workers. While not directly commenting on these issues, the ominous soundscape of Violin Tuned D.E.A.D. nevertheless suggests Nauman’s engagement with that turbulent moment in American history and served as a point of departure for Ligon to consider other works in which the artist’s studio has acted as a conduit for contemporary events. Ligon’s selections posit new identities, conversations or modes of sociability as a response to pressing social and political issues. Entanglements features artworks and ephemera by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, On Kawara, Glenn Ligon, Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Bob Thompson, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Andy Warhol.
Glenn Ligon lives and works in New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1982, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1985. A mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2011 and traveled nationally. Ligon has also been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Power Plant in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He participated in All the World’s Futures at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and he curated the group exhibition Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions (2015) with Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool. Ligon’s work is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Luhring Augustine Bushwick is pleased to present We Need To Wake Up Cause That’s What Time It Is, a new exhibition by the artist Glenn Ligon.
The exhibition features Live (2014), a silent seven channel video installation based on the 1982 film Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip. Pryor is famous for his darkly humorous and often explicit critiques of society, and Ligon has previously incorporated his standup material in a series of colorful text paintings. In Live, Ligon removes Pryor’s voice, and thereby, the incisive comedy for which he is best known. One channel depicts Pryor in full, while the other six channels each focus on a specific part of his body – his hands, head, mouth, groin, and shadow – to concentrate our attention on his animated delivery and emphatic body language. Each screen is illuminated only when that particular part of the body is visible in the original film, thus the screens flicker off and on intermittently, prompting the viewer to walk around them in order to take in the whole installation.
At a certain moment in the original Live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor discusses his tendency to grow increasingly silent when he becomes angry – “the madder I get, the quieter I get” – and his voice gives way to furious gesturing and the mouthing of obscenities, revealing the sheer physicality of his comedy. By deliberately muting his speech and fragmenting his image, Ligon compels us to see Pryor anew and focus on the non-verbal aspects of his performance – his vivid facial expressions, the perpetual motion of his delicate hands, even his bright red suit. This emphasis on the body invariably raises questions regarding social constructs of race and masculinity. Much of Ligon’s practice explores the limits of language, particularly as it relates to history and identity. Live continues in this vein by eliminating language entirely to consider how meaning is conveyed through the body, as well as conferred upon it.
Regen Projects is pleased to announce Well, it's bye-bye / If you call that gone, an exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist Glenn Ligon. Taking its name from the lyrics of blues musician Mississippi Fred McDowell's song "What's the Matter Now," this exhibition will present three distinct bodies of work: a selection of "Come Out" paintings, a neon sculpture, and Ligon's seminal silkscreen painting, "Hands" (1996). This marks the artist's fourth solo presentation at the gallery.
Glenn Ligon has a wide-ranging multimedia art practice that encompasses painting, neon, photography, sculpture, print, installation, and video. Perhaps best known for his monochromatic and highly textured text paintings that draw their content from American history, popular culture, and literary works by writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, Mary Shelley, and Walt Whitman, his work explores issues of history, language, and cultural identity.
On view in this exhibition will be a series of monumental silkscreen paintings inspired by American Minimalist composer Steve Reich's 1966 taped-speech work "Come Out." Reich was commissioned to create a piece for a benefit concert to support the defense fund for the Harlem Six, a group of six African-American teenagers who were wrongfully accused of murdering a shopkeeper in Harlem in 1964. Focusing on the taped testimony of Daniel Hamm, who states that he had to open up his police-inflicted bruises to let some of the blood come out to show them that he was injured and needed treatment, Reich's piece isolates the phrase "come out to show them" and loops it over and over again on two different audio channels which play simultaneously. The looped phrase gradually goes out of synch, turning the words spoken into an abstract soundscape. Similarly, Ligon's paintings echo this strategy by repeatedly silk-screening the same phrase by hand, overlapping the layers of words to varying degrees of density and legibility.
Resting on the floor, an upside down double neon depicts the words America. Comprised of a set of identical neons placed at an angle to each other and blinking in a frenetic manner, the seven letters ambiguously represent a nation, place, or concept. A large silkscreen painting entitled "Hands" (1996) uses found media images taken of the Million Man March that took place in Washington, D.C. on October 16, 1995. This particular piece depicts a moment during the march when organizer Minister Louis Farrakhan called upon the attendees to raise their arms in a pledge of solidarity and collective responsibility for social justice. Repeatedly enlarged through the use of a black and white Xerox photocopier, the representational quality of the image is compromised and falls apart as it becomes increasingly coarse and degraded in its larger form. While created in response to a particular cultural moment, the image nevertheless resonates with the current debates about black visibility and political agency.
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) lives and works in New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1982, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1985. His solo exhibitions include Camden Arts Centre, London (2014-15); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011); The Power Plant, Toronto (2005); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2001); Kunstverein, Munich (2001); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1998). His work was included in Documenta XI (2002) and in two Whitney Biennials (1991, 1993). This summer his work will be included in Okwui Enwezor's All the World's Futures at the 56th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (May 9 - November 22, 2015). Ligon will curate a two-venue exhibition entitled Encounters and Collisions, featuring work by a variety of artists who have inspired his own practice ranging from Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Adrian Piper, Jean Michel Basquiat, and David Hammons to Steve McQueen, Cady Noland, Lorna Simpson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Chris Ofili. The exhibition will be on view at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (April 3 - June 14) and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (June 30 - October 18).
He is a board member of the Foundation for Contemporary Art and has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the Studio Museum's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2009); the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (2006); the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2003); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997). In 2015 he was named a finalist for the Mario Merz Prize.
Monographs and publications on his work include A People on the Cover (Ridinghouse Press, 2015); Come Out (Ridinghouse Press, 2014); Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011); Yourself in the World: Selected Writings and Interviews (Yale University Press, 2011); Some Changes (The Power Plant, 2005); Stranger (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001); Coloring: New Work by Glenn Ligon (Walker Art Center, 2001); and Unbecoming (Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, 1998).
Ligon's work is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; among others.
Over the autumnal months, Camden Arts Centre presents Glenn Ligon: Call
and Response, the first exhibition in a UK public gallery for the
celebrated American artist.
One of America's most distinguished contemporary artists, Ligon
(b.1960) has been deeply engaged with the written word throughout his career.
Drawing attention to the problems of language and representation, he addresses
pressing and challenging topics of race, language and sexuality. His works
reconsider and re-present American history, especially narratives of slavery
and civil rights, within a contemporary context. Best known for his stenciled
text based paintings, he weaves together wide-ranging influences from
literature, visual arts and popular culture. Over the past 10 years, Ligon has
also been dedicated to interrogating these themes through his prolific and
astute writing and interviews.
For his exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Ligon presents a new
series of large paintings based on the 1966 seminal taped-speech work, Come
Out, by Minimalist composer Steve Reich. Come Out is drawn
from the testimony of six black youths arrested for committing a murder during
the Harlem Race Riot of 1964. Known as the 'Harlem Six', the case galvanized
civil rights activists for a generation, bringing to attention police brutality
against black citizens. Echoing Reich's overlapping repetition of words and
phrases, Ligon's silkscreen paintings overlay the words to create slowly
shifting and rhythmic effects.
Ligon is creating a new neon work, which draws on the words of
Daniel Hamm, one of the 'Harlem Six', describing the police beatings. Neon
letters, suspended for visitors to walk amongst, blink on and off in a cycle
reflecting Reich's work. Ligon's neon works continue his interest in pushing
text and speech to the point of abstraction. As with his paintings, they
encourage the viewer to oscillate between reading and looking.
A new multi-screen video work uses footage of comedian Richard
Pryor's 1982 stand-up performance, Live on Sunset Strip. Ligon has reorganized
and refilmed the recorded material to emphasize Pryor's emphatic body language,
movement and expressions, removing articulated words to focus on body language
and the performative delivery of speech.
Glenn Ligon, Stranger #44 (2011), oil, charcoal and graphite on canvas, 72 1/4 by 60 1/8 in.
Excerpted from: Jennifer Aniston Sets Record Price for Glenn Ligon at $13.7 M Artists for Haiti Auction Text by Dan Duray Published September 22, 2011 on New York Observer web site
Despite the massive hype leading up to the event, Ben Stiller and David Zwirner’s Artists For Haiti charity auction at Christie’s [held September 22, 2011] exceeded expectations with the 27 works offered selling for a collective $13.7 million, beating an earlier estimate of $10 million. Most pieces exceeded high estimates, and four artists saw new record prices for their work at auction — Adel Abdessemed, Raymond Pettibon, Nate Lowman and Glenn Ligon, that last piece selling to Jennifer Aniston for $450,000. [Note: Chris Ofili's oil on canvas work Blue Smoke (Pipe Dreams) sold for $420,000.] The prices realized were all at hammer, as well, since Christie’s had waved its fees for the evening.
At $450,000, Ms. Aniston beat Mr. Ligon’s previous record of $434,500, realized at Sotheby’s in September 2010.
Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden
and artist Glenn Ligon in front of Stranger #44.
Photo by Michael Plunkett/PatrickMcMullan.com/Sipa.
Glenn Ligon’s midcareer retrospective Glenn Ligon: America is the cover story of the May 2011 edition of Art in America magazine. (Click here to read article “Stranger in America” by Carly Berwick online.)
Additional articles featuring and/or mentioning black visual artists:
·Kara Walker Q&A with Steel Stillman about “her personal background, the evolution of her well-known cut-paper pieces and films, and how issues of gender and race have informed her latest text-based works.”
·Dawoud Bey’s blog is mentioned by Peter Plagens in “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Artists Grow Up To Be Critics” an essay about artists who write critical art reviews.
·Nick Cave cited in Faye Hirsch’s article “The Everyone Artwork” which argues “the advantages, and the pitfalls, of digital democratization.” (Click here to read online.)
·David Hammons exhibit at L&H Arts reviewed by Kristen Swenson. (Click here to read online.)
·Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston is mentioned in the ArtWorld column.
·Holly Hotchner, Director of the Museum of Arts & Design, NY writes a letter to the editor responding to the publication’s unfair commentary regarding MAD’s recent exhibit “The Global Africa Project.”
In this video, artist Glenn Ligon and curator Scott Rothkopf discuss Ligon's "America" neons and his body of work in response to James Baldwin's essay "Stranger in the Village," both of which are on view in the exhibition "Glenn Ligon: AMERICA."
A STARTLING sight will soon be hanging in midair in the Madison Avenue window of the Whitney Museum of American Art, just a few blocks from Ralph Lauren, Prada and Gucci: a 22-foot-long neon sign spelling out the words “negro sunshine.”
It’s the work of the New York Conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, whose midcareer retrospective, “Glenn Ligon: America,” opens at the Whitney on March 10. Taken from “Melanctha,” a 1909 novella by Gertrude Stein about a mixed-race woman, “negro sunshine” is the kind of ambiguous phrase that Mr. Ligon, who is black, uses to speak of the history of African-Americans. “I find her language fascinating,” he said of Stein. “It’s a phrase that stuck in my head.”
Are those two words, installed in such a prominent manner, meant to shock?
“Shock,” repeated Mr. Ligon, a bit surprised at the question. “It’s not provocative, it’s Gertrude Stein.”
“Even my Richard Pryor paintings,” he went on, referring to a series of work based on jokes told by that black comedian, use a common racial epithet. “Turn on the radio,” he said. “A word like that is so archaic, it’s not of this time. It’s about language.”
Since the late 1980s Mr. Ligon, 51, who is gay, has been creating paintings, prints and drawings using phrases written or uttered by personalities like Mary Shelley, James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Sometimes the words appear as a line floating in the middle of a canvas; other times are they are repeated over and over in a way that makes them abstract and illegible.
These phrases are often oblique — “I do not always feel colored”; “I lost my voice I found my voice”; “I was somebody”; “I am somebody” — raising a controversial or mysterious question and leaving the viewer to work for the answers. Mr. Ligon generally deals with race, gayness or simply what he calls “outsiderness,” and his paintings, drawings, sculptures and videos have captured the attention of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, which all have his work in their permanent collections. He’s also been noticed by President and Mrs. Obama, who chose Mr. Ligon’s 1992 painting “Black Like Me #2” for their private quarters at the White House, on loan from the Hirshhorn.
“Glenn is someone who has figured out how to give Conceptualism some grit,” said Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, who bought an early painting by Mr. Ligon for himself and later another for MoMA when he was a curator there. “He’s influenced a younger generation, perhaps because he is a political artist but not a protest artist. He has an unwillingness to be boxed in.”
His retrospective feels particularly timely because it comes at a moment when glaring polemics are no longer fashionable. Artists these days raise social and historical issues but usually keep them at a distance. Yet the underlying messages of works like “Hands,” a photograph from the Million Man March, speak to the urgency of change. “His work captures political moments en masse, which seem quite compelling now when you consider the Middle East and the protests of collective bargaining in the Midwest as a form of democracy,” said the artist Lorna Simpson.
Since Mr. Ligon’s work draws heavily on written sources, one might expect his Brooklyn studio to resemble the Collyer Brothers’ apartment, a haphazard pile-up of books, magazines and papers. But instead, his sunny space is spotless, with only one neatly arranged bookshelf and crisp white walls where a few of his painting hang. (Others are carefully propped up on the floor, leaning against one another.)
On a recent wintry afternoon less than a month before the show Mr. Ligon greeted a visitor in a down jacket, apologizing because there was barely any heat in the building. When asked about his looming deadline, he could still manage his trademark throaty laugh. “I’ve become very Zen,” he said. “I’ve gone through all the stages: anger, bargaining, acceptance. These days I spend so much time at the Whitney, all the guards know me.”
Mr. Ligon is the kind of guy who could fit in anywhere. With his shaved head, black glasses and wide smile, he has an unassuming yet welcoming face, one that has appeared in J. Crew catalogs and Gap ads. He has a dry wit and can talk as easily about serious fiction as popular movies and television shows. “There was a time when I was a huge TV addict,” he confessed. “I used to race home from school to watch ‘Dark Shadows.’ ” More recently he has been hooked on the British soap opera “Downton Abbey,” which he enjoys partly because it’s about class.
Mr. Ligon himself grew up in a working-class family in the Bronx, his father a line foreman for General Motors and his mother a nurse’s aide. Weekdays he would commute to Manhattan, to Walden, a West Side private school, now defunct, where he and his older brother had scholarships. (“I don’t think my mother knew it was one of the most liberal schools in America,” he recalled.)
When he first thought he wanted to be an artist, his mother told him that “the only artists I ever heard of are dead,” but she enrolled him in pottery classes and made sure he got any book he wanted. “We didn’t have a lot of extra money, but there was an attitude that if it was educational, it was O.K.,” Mr. Ligon said. “Books, yes. Trips to the Met, yes. Hundred-dollar sneakers, no.” That, he said, may account for his love of literature. He reads voraciously — on paper, not on a screen — marking phrases that jump out at him.
Mr. Ligon went on to Wesleyan University with thoughts of becoming an architect, “but I realized I was more interested in how people live in buildings rather than making them,” he said. After college he became a proofreader in a law firm and painted at night and on weekends.
His big break came in 1989, when he got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. “I thought if the government thinks I’m an artist, then I must be one,” he said. He started making art full time.
Now, although his studio is in Park Slope, he lives in Manhattan, near Chinatown. “I like having a studio to go to,” he said. “It’s like having a job.”
Although an urbanite at heart, Mr. Ligon also has a house in Hudson, N.Y., chosen for all the antiques shops and restaurants within walking distance. “In high school driver’s ed was at the same time as drama class,” he said, laughing. “And I had to take drama class. Now I can sing the lead in ‘Oklahoma!,’ but I can’t drive. ‘Oklahoma!’ was my destiny.”
So, it seems, is the Whitney. He joined its Independent Study Program in the mid-1980s and over the years has been part of many exhibitions, including two Biennials, the first in 1991 with three works for which he stenciled passages taken from the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston on abandoned hollow-core doors. For the 1993 Biennial he produced an elaborate installation of photographs and texts examining the social implications of Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic pictures of black men.
His work was also in the Whitney’s controversial “Black Male” exhibition the following year, where he showed a series of eight paintings in which newspaper profiles of the teenage black and Hispanic defendants in the Central Park jogger case were stenciled in oil stick on canvas. The results had the handmade look of early Jasper Johns, a hero of Mr. Ligon’s.
In 1996, when he had a show of drawings at the Brooklyn Museum, Holland Cotter, wrote in The New York Times: “Mr. Ligon’s drawn words have their own mystery. Seen through a haze of charcoal or in raking gallery light, they’re hard to read, but their ideas are big.”
Mr. Ligon slowly started gaining prominence in the early ’90s along with a generation of artists like Ms. Simpson, Gary Simmons and Janine Antoni. But he hit a kind of artistic jackpot when the Obamas chose “Black Like Me #2” for their private living space at the White House. It came as a total surprise to Mr. Ligon, who said he was “very flattered.”
“It’s not an easy piece, which is why I’m so thrilled,” said Mr. Ligon, who has never met the Obamas. The painting’s title echoes John Howard Griffin’s 1961 memoir, in which Griffin, who was white, traveled in the South posing as a black man.
In trying to capture the sweep of Mr. Ligon’s career, Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney curator who organized the retrospective, said he had tried to show him in a way that went beyond the obvious. “Although people think they know his work — the black and white text paintings in particular — I’ve tried to tease out the distinctions of one painting from another so that people can appreciate their specificity,” he said.
Mr. Ligon forms letters with stencils because “it’s a way to be semi-mechanical, to make letters that are not handwriting but have personality,” he said. “Handwriting would make these quotations too much mine, and stencils give it a bit more distance. They also allow me to keep being painterly but also have the kind of content I want a painting to have.” And rather than use oil paint, which can get messy, he uses oil stick, so that each letter has a more defined quality. For some works he has also flocked the canvas with coal dust to give it a textured, glittering feeling.
Neon sculptures create yet another message, a kind of 21st-century signage that hints at advertising but is quite the opposite of promotional. On the first floor of Mr. Ligon’s studio building is Lite Brite Neon, a custom lighting fabrication studio where, on a recent visit, the “negro sunshine” sculpture was being made for the Whitney’s window. On a long work table the perfectly made letters spelling out “negro” rested against a white metal backing.
As Mr. Ligon inspected the progress, he explained that the front of the letters will be painted black, for a shadow play between light and dark. In the show there will also be neon wall reliefs that spell out just one word — “America” — from which the retrospective’s title was taken.
Mr. Rothkopf said the decision to call the show “Glenn Ligon: America” was a very conscious one. “Although he emerged amidst a generation of artists who deal with race and sexual identity, his work speaks more broadly,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “Not just to African-Americans or gay Americans, but to all Americans.”
Even children. There will be work Mr. Ligon made in 2000, for an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he gave kids black-history coloring books from the 1970s to crayon. What particularly fascinated him was how totally oblivious the children were to the political agenda behind the images. “One of the kids looked at the Malcom X picture and asked if it was me,” he said.
The retrospective will also include paintings based on “Stranger in the Village,” a 1953 essay by Baldwin. “I keep returning to it over and over again,” Mr. Ligon said. “It’s panoramic. Baldwin is in Switzerland, he’s working on a novel, and he’s thinking about what it means to be a stranger somewhere, literally and metaphorically. You have to be a bit outside of something to see it. I think any artist does that. It’s an artist’s job to always have their antennas up.”
Article by Daniel Kunitz / Photograph by Keziban Barry
Asked about the paintings in his tidy Brooklyn studio, Glenn Ligon jocularly claims they’re "just wampum. I don’t even make work to sell anymore. I just make it to trade." For what? you might wonder. "All those artists that I can’t really afford to buy." His numerous collectors will, no doubt, hope he’s kidding. Whatever Ligon hasn’t already traded away can be seen in "Glenn Ligon: America," a 25-year retrospective that opens March 10 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. He has also contributed to a volume that will be published this spring. "A People on the Cover" explores the cultural and political history of black people by analyzing the images and graphics on the front of books written by and about them.
To view items from the artist's studio, with Ligon's accompanying commentary,
SKOWHEGAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING & SCULPTURE ANNOUNCES
A LIMITED EDITION PRINT BY GLENN LIGON
Draft, 2010
Aquatint with spitbite, sugarlift and drypoint
on Hahnemühle copperplate bright white paper
Plate size: 20" x 16"
Paper size: 25" x 20"
Edition of 55 with 10 APs and 4 PPs
Signed and numbered by the artist
$1,400
Price will be raised after the first 25 in the edition are sold
Please contact the Skowhegan office at 212.529.0505 or email at mail@skowheganart.org if you are interested in purchasing this print. Packing and Shipping charges are additional and will be billed separately.
Since 1970, Skowhegan has published a number of benefit print editions to help raise money for scholarships. In recent years, well over 90% of Skowhegan participants have been awarded financial aid. Artists such as Josef Albers, Janet Fish, Yvonne Jacquette, Jasper Johns, Anish Kapoor, Whitfield Lovell, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Louise Nevelson, Joel Shapiro, Fred Tomaselli and others have been incredibly generous with their time and talent.
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