Glenn Ligon (b. 1960)

‘In writing,’ says Glenn Ligon, ‘something is always left out, it can't be articulated in the space of an essay. Using letters that bleed and disappear is about getting to that difficulty’ (G. Ligon in H. Drohojowska-Philp, ‘Glenn Ligon Gets Obama’s Vote,’ LA Times, 11 December 2009). In Draft (2010) an array of aquatint techniques bodies forth a disintegrated flurry of letters and punctuation marks, meaning lost in the eddy and swirl of correction and revision. Ligon’s textual conceptualism deals with life as an outsider, examining race and homosexuality through a polyvocal prism of quotation and visual poetry. Scattering letters across the page, he underlines the slippery semiotics of language and labels, allowing voice to fragment or coalesce in shifting palimpsests of meaning.

It is testament to Ligon’s intelligent treatment of the black experience in America that in 2009 his painting Black Like Me #2 (1992) was chosen by the Obamas to adorn their living quarters in the White House; the painting quotes John Howard Griffin's 1961 memoir of the same title, narrating the white author’s travels through the South disguised as a black man. As Holland Cotter wrote in 1996, ‘Mr. Ligon's use of old-fashioned stencil type links his drawings with the early work of Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana, though his direct address to questions of race and sexuality mark a departure from those models. However forthright their content, though, 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’ (H. Cotter, ‘Art in Review: The Evidence of Things Not Seen – Drawings by Glenn Ligon,’ New York Times, 18 October 1996).