Glenn Ligon – författare

Documenting Jennie C. Jones’s multisensory site-specific artwork, this volume highlights her inspirations—from Minimalism and Modernism to avant-garde music  Multimedia artist Jennie C. Jones draws on the aesthetics of minimalism and the improvisational qualities of avant-garde music to consider the sonic potential of abstraction. This volume, the latest in The Met’s Roof Garden Commission series, documents Jones’s dynamic installation. It features a trio of sculptural forms based on stringed instruments—a zither, a one-string, and an Aeolian harp—joined by a floor-based work that serves as the “conductor” of this ensemble. Full of sonic possibility, the sculptures sit quietly until they are played by the movement of the wind. An essay situates Ensemble within the artist’s larger practice and an interview with Jones conducted by Glenn Ligon charts the development of the commission, connects her site-responsive work to the collection and architecture of The Met, and explores the artist’s unique engagement with sound and visual abstraction.  Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press  Exhibition Schedule:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(April 15–October 19, 2025)

In this artist book, celebrated American Conceptual artist Glenn Ligon traces the representation of Black people on book covers in the United States, highlighting the deliberate use of typography, photography and graphics. Best known for appropriating imagery and text from popular culture, Ligon has selected over 50 book covers – by both lesser-known and seminal authors, such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison – to explore a rich and complex set of histories and representations. To introduce the book, an essay by Ligon identifies one of the foundation stones of his life and work: the act of reading. Spanning the twentieth century and grouped thematically, the covers reveal correspondences between the past and the present, as well as links between the social and visual constructs of race, beauty and the body. Published to coincide with the exhibition Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, both co-curated and featuring works by the artist, held at Nottingham Contemporary (4 April–14 June 2015) and Tate Liverpool (30 June–18 October 2015).

A collection of Black American artist Glenn Ligon’s groundbreaking text-based paintings  American artist Glenn Ligon is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, which draw on the influential writings and speeches of twentieth-century historical and cultural figures, including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein. Glenn Ligon serves as an introduction to the artist’s oeuvre and accompanies a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in which his art is displayed in dialogue with objects from the Fitzwilliam and Trinity College collections selected by the artist himself.  Informed by his experiences as a Black man living in New York, Ligon’s art is a sustained meditation on issues of interpretation through translation and quotation, the role of the past in the present, and the representation of the self in relation to culture and history, both as the conceptual underpinning and as a critique of modern society. His incisive text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, highlight the social, linguistic, and political constructions of race, gender, and sexuality.  By exploring Ligon’s curatorial practice alongside his artworks, the exhibition showcases the ideas of one of the most significant Black artists working today in direct dialogue with museological tradition. Issues such as art making and aesthetics, as well as broader questions about race and its sociopolitical implications, are further developed in the catalogue, which includes essays and conversations between Ligon and a range of museum curators.