Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art.

He is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the influential writings and speech of 20th-century cultural figures including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. He received a BA from Wesleyan University and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective, AMERICA, that was organized by Scott Rothkopf and traveled nationally. Important solo exhibitions include All Over the Place, The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge; Post-Noir, Carre d’Art, Nîmes; Call and Response, Camden Arts Centre, London; and Some Changes, The Power Plant Center for Contemporary Art, Toronto (traveled internationally). Select curatorial projects include Grief and Grievance, New Museum, New York (2021); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2017); and Encounters and Collisions, Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool (2015).

Ligon’s work is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including Tate Modern; Centre Pompidou; Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery of Art; Walker Art Center; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. Ligon is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters.