Glen Ligon

Study for Negro Sunshine number 85 and number 86
Dated 2012

Glenn Ligon (American, b.1960) is a Bronx-born multimedia Conceptual artist, best known for his textual paintings that explore the history of race and sexuality in America. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design and received a BA from Wesleyan University in 1982, and in 1985 participated in the Whitney Independent Studies program. Ligon‘s early career was in Abstract Art, but progressed to Conceptual ideas in the late 1980s when he began to create his famous textual paintings. In these paintings, Ligon uses repetition of text taken from well-known writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Pryor to tell visual stories of sexuality, race, and identity. The majority of Ligon‘s work focuses of African American identity, and more recently, interracial gay sex. He lives and works in New York.
He is best known for paintings in black oil stick (and, sometimes, coal dust) of stencilled, racially charged prose, such as a work from 1990 that quotes a line from Zora Neale Hurston: .I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.. The words repeat, from the top to the bottom of a tall, white-painted board, becoming increasingly smudged and illegible and the importance to his work of Jasper Johns‘s stencilled lettering is obvious—made him something of a conservative on a scene whose preferred mode was the appropriation of photographic images.