The Most Well Connected Poorman in America: Artist.............Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon

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Glenn Ligon

Born
1960 (1960)
Bronx, NewYork

Nationality
American

Untitled (I'm Turning Into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I'm Going to Haunt You) 1992, Oil and gesso on canvas. The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Glenn Ligon is an American conceptual artist whose work explores race, language, desire, and identity.^[1] He engages in intertextuality by dialoging with other works from the visual arts, literature, and history, as well as his own life.

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Life and works

Born in 1960 in the Bronx, he graduated with a B.A. from Wesleyan University and currently lives and works in New York City.^[2] He works in multiple media, including painting, video, photography, and digital media such as Adobe Flash for his work Annotations. In 1989, he mounted his first solo show, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," in Brooklyn.^[3]

Ligon is best known for his large, text-based paintings in which a chosen phrase is repeated over and over, eventually dissipating into murk. Another series of large paintings was based on children's interpretations of 1970s black-history coloring books. Ligon's work is greatly informed by his experiences as an African American and as a gay man living in the United States. In 2005, Ligon won an Alphonse Fletcher Foundation Fellowship for his art work.

Ligon's 1992 "Black Like Me No. 2" is currently hanging in the White House, in the first family's living quarters.^[4]

References

^ Meyer, Richard. "Glenn Ligon." Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2. Edited by George E. Haggerty. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.
^ http://www.broadartfoundation.org/collection/ligon.html
^ Meyer, Richard. "Glenn Ligon." Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2. Edited by George E. Haggerty. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.
^ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/obamas-modern-art-photos_n_311958.html