Glenn Ligon, with Friends and Strangers
by Daniel Merritt

Ligon, a native New Yorker, emerged from his hometown arts scene in the late 1980s, a time in which the nuances of selfhood were examined and suffused into art with a semiotic bent, from Félix González-Torres’s human-weighted candy spills, to Cindy Sherman’s self-stylized heroines, to Barbara Kruger’s declarative collages that target an implicated “you.” Strategies of appropriation, too, fueled this generation of artists, who invoked the works and writings of others to bring their own private history into closer proximity with a collective cultural memory. For over four decades, Glenn Ligon has inhabited extant language as a second skin, borrowing sentences from writers, comedians, teachers, lovers, anonymous and unwitting authors, to sketch the pitfalls and possibilities of navigating systems of power. He knows some of these writers, but there are also many he will never meet. The artist’s arsenal of words, penned and spoken by friends and forebears, forges a morphing, chimeric avatar for Ligon himself, who, amid enduring cultural reckonings, remains both influential and enigmatic.

Much has been written of Ligon’s artistic origin story, detailing the artist’s formative encounters with Abstract Expressionism in the museums of New York City. Willem de Kooning, an early love of Ligon’s, was soon followed by an embrace of Cy Twombly. These budding passions were complicated by the then-trenchant anti-painting rhetoric of the Whitney Independent Study Program, which Ligon completed in 1985. The paintings that he developed during this period strike a reconciliatory tone between his early inspirations and pedagogical influence. On paper, oil and enamel in a palette of soft pinks, grays, and blues merge in thick brushstrokes. The tip of a pencil forges delicate paths of handwriting and silhouettes of bodies within the impasto. The painting discloses: “I don’t really know why it happened. I mean, I’m not gay or anything. It was a fluke. Yes, that’s it. It just happened. I’m sure it will never happen again.” Twombly meets Honcho magazine. The painting, one of four linked works made in the same year, suggests a moment of vulnerability for Ligon, though these texts were sourced from the pages of gay porn magazines, their authors unknown. The boundary between Ligon and the anonymous source of the story is indeterminate, blurred in swaths of paint. The Porn Drawings marked the last time Ligon’s handwriting would appear in his own work; more mechanical presentations would soon follow.

In a 1993 conversation with curator Phyllis Rosenzweig on the occasion of his groundbreaking exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum, To Disembark, Ligon remarked, “Curiously, the more ‘hands off’ the production method, the more personal investment is evident in the work . . . I am interested in the border between what is mechanical, repetitive, impersonal and what is autobiographical.” The show was anchored by two sets of prints, Narratives (nine photogravures) and Runaways (ten lithographs), which, respectively, subverted templates used by abolitionists to tell the stories of freed slaves and posters that alerted the public to slaves who had fled to freedom. The inherent violence of both forms was complicated by Ligon, who mimicked the tone and styles of the originals, but injected the writing with searing critiques and macabre humor regarding contemporary race relations. Narratives merged Ligon’s autobiography, including a trip to his mother’s hometown and his experiences of racism in the art world, with epigraphs by public figures like bell hooks and Hilton Als, as well as historical icons like Josephine Baker, whose quote reads: “The very idea of America makes me shake, it makes me tremble, it gives me nightmares.” For Runaways, Ligon enlisted friends to describe him in the style of a police report. And in spite of the harrowing nature of these documents and their use, the ease and insider humor of Ligon’s real friendships within the prose remain undeniable. It is as if the profiling, playful and oblivious of formal context, is unfolding in front of the viewer.

Ran away, a man named Glenn. He has almost no hair. He has cat-eye glasses, medium-dark skin, cute eyebrows. He’s wearing black shorts, black shoes and a short sleeve plaid shirt. He has a really cool Timex silver watch with a silver band. He’s sort of short, a little hunky, though you might not notice it with his shirt untucked. He talks sort of out of the side of his mouth and looks at you sideways. Sometimes he has a loud laugh, and lately I’ve noticed he refers to himself as “mother.”

This cross-temporal collision of voices, between Ligon’s own, those of notable thinkers, and friends who remain anonymous, generates an affective history in which the artist’s lived experience becomes inextricable from the weight of America’s sinister past. The resulting dissonance of this mingling of intimates and distant influences positions Ligon as an alchemist time traveler who asserts that the past is inescapable.

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James Baldwin died in the medieval town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence on December 1, 1987. Glenn Ligon was twenty-seven years old. They never met. In the years after Baldwin’s passing, Ligon found global success as an artist, appearing in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and the 1994 landmark exhibition Black Male, both of which illuminated the curatorial prowess of Thelma Golden, who would become a friend and frequent interlocutor of Ligon. Nine years after Baldwin’s death, when the American writer was not yet a household name, Ligon made his first Stranger painting, a work in stenciled oil stick that featured an excerpt of Baldwin’s short story “Stranger in the Village.” The text details Baldwin’s experience of visiting the Swiss town of Lukerbad with his then boyfriend, where he comes to the realization that he may be the first Black person these villagers have ever encountered. The text would become a signature within Ligon’s practice, appearing first in January 2001 in a solo exhibition curated by Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Over the past three decades, Baldwin’s words have materialized in various states of legibility across canvases of different scales, some of which feature the story in its entirety. Many are entirely black, adorned with luminous coal dust; others offer stark contrasts of black and white. Recent iterations appear as white monochromes. Like those works from the mid-1980s, the oil is painted on thick, though rather than being carved out, the language portrays an almost ancient accretion, as though Baldwin’s disclosures have fossilized. They are often impossible to read. Laying bare the incomprehensible is Ligon’s gift.

Writing for T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2021, Megan O’Grady noted that, “In Ligon’s appropriation of texts, I’ve thought I recognized a fellow introvert’s form of intimacy, a deep engagement with the words of forebears in the absence of actual mentors. But it also seems true that reframing the thoughts of others allows Ligon to express himself in a different register through the ventriloquism of art.” It is a cogent observation, and one that points toward Ligon’s unique talent as an artist, one that continues to unveil itself as he, like Baldwin, becomes an icon of American culture. The words of other co-conspirators offer a tactical protection, an ability to hide in plain sight. Writing for Artforum on the artist David Hammons, a lodestar, Ligon asks, “What does it mean, then, to try not to move at all, not to speak, for a body to be unreadable? Stillness and interiority can function as a critical stance, a kind of resistance.” There is a shield-like quality to Ligon’s Stranger paintings, opaque and fortified with a ceaseless allure. Over the last three decades, Ligon explains to me, these works have become near self-portraits, unintended emblems of the artist’s legacy, a legacy that carries with it the lives and memories of those who have altered the course of the world. We contemplate how this might be expressed in an exhibition. We agree that these are ideas that will best be understood once written.

Near where we are sitting in the studio, a single painting with the aura of a mythological stone lies flat on a table. It faces the ceiling like a medical patient, bearing an excerpt of text from “Stranger in the Village.” With the exception of some softening edges, it is very much like his other Stranger paintings. But this painting is also a tool. Ligon applies kozo paper, a strong, translucent paper made from the inner bark of a mulberry tree, on top of this painting, rubbing carbon and graphite over the surface so that Baldwin’s words emerge like a whispered prophecy. The characters recede and dissolve, only to return again, delicate and warped. If the paintings are self-portraits, are the drawings an experiment in self-annihilation? Their weightlessness implies a release. But such echoes are persistent, outstretched to an unshaped future.