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)

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.

A collection of by turns polemical and personal writings and interviews from conceptual artist and commentator Glenn Ligon in an accessible paperback volume. This long-awaited and essential publication collects three decades of writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose work has been delivering an incisive examination of race, history, sexuality, and culture in America since his emergence as an artist in the late 1980s. No stranger to text, Ligon has routinely used writings from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Richard Pryor, and others to construct work that centers Blackness within the historically white backdrop of the artworld and culture writ large. He began writing in the early 2000s, engaging deeply with the work of peers such as Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili, and Lorna Simpson, as well as artists that came before him, among them Philip Guston, David Hammons, and Andy Warhol. Throughout the publication’s sixteen essays, Ligon combines razor-sharp insight with anecdotal and biographical details, providing the fullest picture yet of the artist and his ongoing evaluation of the art and politics of our time. Complementing these texts are illuminating interviews with Helga Davis, Thelma Golden, Byron Kim, Hamza Walker, and others, as well as a foreword by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax and an afterword by the artist.