Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon is best known for powerful text-based paintings and lightworks that offer challenging messages about Black identity and queerness in America. The artist often references African American thinkers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Pryor. He has stenciled their quotes in black paint on white canvas, illuminated them in neon lettering, and overlaid them so many times that they black out a white page. Ligon balances bleakness and humor: In his contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–93), for example, Ligon paired photographs and texts that satirized cultural representations of the Black male body. He has been the subject of solo shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among other institutions. Ligon also featured at Documenta in 2002, at the Whitney Biennial in 1991, and at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and 2015.