Glenn Ligon

(American, born 1960)

Glenn Ligon is an American Conceptual artist known for his text-based paintings, prints, and sculptures. Ligon often explores ideas of sexuality, violence, and racial identity within American history through the intertextuality between literature and visual arts, sourcing material from both historical and invented texts. The artist’s signature hand-stenciled paintings and neon art sculptures, often portray a series of phrases that, when exhibited in the museum or gallery context, prompts the viewer to read them in a new way, such as in Double America (2012). He frequently appropriates text from well-known writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, and Walt Whitman to tell visual stories of ambiguous and unsettling nature. “My job is not to produce answers,” he once explained. “My job is to produce good questions.” Born in the Bronx, NY in 1960, he graduated with a BA from Wesleyan University in 1982, going on to participate in the Whitney Museum of Art's Independent Study Program in 1985. Ligon has garnered widespread critical acclaim for his work, including mounting solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the St. Louis Art Museum, among others. He lives and works in New York, NY.