Visual Language Magazine Contemporary Fine Art March 2013 Vol 2 No 3

Critique of: High Museum of Art prese
by Atlanta Art Professor C
http://musiqology.com/tag/glenn-ligon/
Glenn Ligon is a conceptual artist whose work explores
issues of race, sexuality, representation and language. Born
in the Bronx, Ligon still lives and works in New York. With
a BA from Wesleyan University in 1982, Ligon was chosen
for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent
Study Program in 1985. His work has since been featured in
solo exhibitions at impressive venues including the Hirshorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum,
Dia Center for the Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The
Power Plant and most recently a mid-career retrospective
traveled from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, closing its tour at the
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
http://whereisthepower.com/page_id=77
From a Postcolonial viewpoint Ligon exemplifies the lens to which African American art should be
evaluated, from its own aesthetics and through its own lexicon. The fact that one has to know who
Richard Pryor, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X all point to the mandatory reading
required and excluded from Western art dialogue. He uses African American culture and language as
the primary source material of his work.
Ligon lecture was the very best artist conversation the High has hosted, he was so candid about his
influences and progression as an artist, and it was truly refreshing. Ligon discussed the retrospective
and why those particular works were included in the exhibition. How his Malcolm X piece came to
be, as well as his noted neon’s. It was great to see and hear the conflict between medium and concept
that became present in Ligon’s text based works, leaving the “painterly “ behind to pursue a precise
dialogue.
This lecture illuminated some inconsistencies between Ligon’s personal conversation and the commonly
accepted “text-based conceptual artist” dialogue about his work. These discrepancies demanded
an analysis/ rereading of Ligon’s retrospective. Upon rereading his work, it is often formulaic,
iconic, illustrating concept rather than conceptual.
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