Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon
Lab Grant Resident
Over the course of his residency, Ligon collaborated with Dieu Donné Studio Director, Megan Moorhouse to create two editions: End of Year Reports, 2003, and Self Portrait at Eleven Years Old, 2004. The first is a suite of eight prints on handmade paper that recreate the artists grade school report cards. The second is a pulp painted image of Stevie Wonder, titled as a self portrait to reference the artist’s identification with his childhood musical hero.
“Remember when you were a kid and one album or a song seemed to speak directly to your soul? The singer seemed to have made the record just for you. And you lived intensely in that album or son for a while, playing it everyday, buying posters of the singer, dressing like him or her, imitating his or her singing style in the bathroom mirror. That singer’s image was your image and that is what the series of drawings and the print at Dieu Donné is about. I am trying remember what singers I was into when I was younger and I am doing drawings of a singer to correspond to every year of my life. The List varies widely, from Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson to David Bowie and Jessye Norman. It is about how you can become so intensely identified with pop culture figures that they become part of how you see yourself in the world.”
— Glenn Ligon, Excerpt from Glenn Ligon: Circa 1971, ‘72, or ‘73, Lab Grant Publication Series No. 6, Dieu Donné
About the Artist
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960, Bronx, NY) is an artist living and working in New York. Through his work he pursues an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. He is best known for his text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein and Richard Pryor. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2011 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important recent shows include Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions (2015), a curatorial project organized with Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool, and Blue Black (2017), an exhibition Ligon curated at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, inspired by the site-specific Ellsworth Kelly wall. Ligon has also been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Power Plant in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015 and 1997), Berlin Biennal (2014), Istanbul Biennal (2011), Documenta XI (2002), and Gwangju Biennale (2000). (Source: Artist’s website)
For more information, please visit their website: http://www.glennligonstudio.com/