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- Art & Design
MAR 10: Glenn Ligon
March 2011
Glenn Ligon had his first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American
Art in 1993, the same year he appeared in the museum’s much maligned
biennial. At the time, politically provocative art dominated the
cultural landscape, and as the conceptual artist channeled
African-American cultural history through text-based pieces that
declared things like “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a
sharp white background,” Ligon found himself stereotyped as an artist
propagandizing about racial identity. “Everyone imagines that my first
texts, paintings, and drawings came from literary sources—the writings
of Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, James Baldwin,” Ligon says. “But what
they haven’t seen is a series of drawings from 1985 where I scrawled
text from gay-porn magazine stories on top of and into very
expressionistic, painterly grounds.” A new solo exhibition at the
Whitney, “Glenn Ligon: America,” which opens March 10 and runs through
June 5, aims to correct that misperception and more. For years the
substance of Ligon’s art obscured its style (the work trades in cultural
ephemera ranging from children’s coloring books to Richard Pryor jokes),
but the show’s 100 newly displayed paintings, prints, drawings,
photographs, and sculptures reveal a playful balancing of form and
content. As Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf, who organized the
exhibition, puts it, “Ligon is that rare artist who manages to make work
that is both socially relevant and visually ravishing.” Porn, politics,
and pop—what’s more American, really, than finding high style in low
places?
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