Glenn Ligon, the artist who paints America’s words until they can no longer be read

Glenn Ligon

Born	1960 The Bronx
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship

Most people who stand in front of a Glenn Ligon painting cannot finish reading it. A sentence by James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston starts out crisp at the top of the canvas, stencilled by hand in black oilstick, and by the bottom it has thickened into a dark field where the words are still there but no longer give themselves up. The American conceptual artist has spent his working life making famous texts harder to read, while museums turned him into one of the most readable names in American art. That gap is the most interesting thing about him.

This autumn the gap is on view in two cities at once. At Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles, his Coloring paintings, canvases built from pages of old Black-history colouring books that schoolchildren filled in for him, are back on the wall. In London, Thomas Dane Gallery pairs some of the same paintings with large new canvases made from the templates of his AMERICA neons. Both reopen material the canon filed under his name long ago.

Ligon was born in 1960 and grew up in the Forest Houses, a public housing project in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. At seven he and his older brother won scholarships, arranged by their divorced, working-class parents, to the Walden School, a progressive school in Manhattan. After two years at the Rhode Island School of Design he finished at Wesleyan University in 1982. He then proofread for a law firm and painted abstractions after Willem de Kooning in his spare time, before the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1985.

Abstraction could not carry what he wanted to say about race, so in the mid-1980s he let words in. Untitled (I Am a Man), from 1988, repaints the placard carried by striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. Then came the stencils. Hurston’s line “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” runs down a white canvas until the black of the letters swallows the white, and the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man gets the same treatment. The smudge was the method: every pass of the stencil dirtied the next line.

He pointed the method at desire, too. Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, made between 1991 and 1993, takes 91 of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Black men and frames them between rows of 78 short typed texts on sex, race, AIDS and the political fight over Mapplethorpe. In 1993 he asked friends to describe him and printed their words as lithographs in the style of nineteenth-century notices for fugitive slaves. His experience as a gay Black man is the ground those works stand on, never a footnote.

The sources kept widening. From 1993 he painted Richard Pryor’s stand-up routines from the 1970s. From 1996 he worked through Stranger in the Village, Baldwin’s 1953 essay about being the first Black man the people of a Swiss mountain village had ever seen, and in 2021 he finally painted the essay in full. A residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1999 and 2000 produced the Coloring works: children coloured in pages of Malcolm X or Harriet Tubman, and he kept each child’s palette and composition at the scale of a painting.

His reputation is tied to a word that is easy to misread. In the late 1990s he and the curator Thelma Golden began using the term “post-black”, and Golden made it the frame of her 2001 group show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. They meant artists who refused to be filed as “Black artists” while remaining deeply invested in blackness. The phrase was often heard as “post-racial”, close to the opposite of what his paintings argue. In 2009 Barack Obama borrowed Black Like Me No. 2 from the Hirshhorn for the private quarters of the White House, a painting whose sentence comes from John Howard Griffin’s account of a white man who darkened his skin to travel the segregated South. Ligon does not mistake the embrace for courage. “Artists imagine that museums are brave—they’re not,” he told Artnet in 2021.

Neon made light out of the same problem. Warm Broad Glow, his first, from 2005, spells “negro sunshine”, a phrase from Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, in white neon with the front of each letter painted black. Double America, from 2012, sets the word twice, one row of it backwards. The Whitney’s mid-career retrospective, organised by Scott Rothkopf, came in 2011. For the 2015 Venice Biennale he hung A Small Band on the facade of the Central Pavilion, three neon words, “blues”, “blood” and “bruise”, taken from the testimony of Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, young Black men wrongly convicted of murder in 1960s New York. At the Musée d’Orsay in 2019, Des Parisiens Noirs spelled out in neon the names of Black models from nineteenth-century paintings, one of them simply “nom inconnu”.

This year has been crowded. Over the summer, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin hung Double America alone inside Mies van der Rohe’s glass pavilion from July 4 to October 11; in his Brooklyn Rail review, Charles Moore wrote that a shadow “is meant to be a faithful index, just darker. And this one lies.” In Seoul, his first solo show in South Korea set black moon jars, after the white porcelain of the Joseon dynasty, beside his paintings. The Los Angeles show runs until January 17, 2027, and the London one, his sixth with Thomas Dane, from October 13 to December 19, 2026.

Ligon lives in New York, works in a Brooklyn studio and sits on the board of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. His honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003, the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 2006 and the Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize in 2009, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.

The next test of his relationship with legibility opens in April 2027. Glenn Ligon: Subtext, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is his first survey in the United States in fifteen years. Curated by Molly Donovan, it pairs more than 40 of his works with about 20 by artists he chose, then travels to the Walker Art Center, where the children coloured those books, in October 2027 and to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2028. A survey is a machine for making an artist readable, and Ligon has already said what happens when a text tries: “They try to communicate, but they can’t say everything. That failure is productive.”

Tags: art, artists, contemporary art, James Baldwin, Glenn Ligon, A Small Band