Glenn Ligon talks to Ben Luke about the artists, writers, musicians and other cultural figures who inspire and intrigue him, and the pivotal cultural moments in his life. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1960, Ligon works across various media, from painting to film and neon, and primarily uses text and found images to produce powerful ruminations on contemporary politics, culture and African American identity. Despite the array of media he uses, Ligon’s work is hugely consistent in its language and subject matter, with an economy and directness of form allied to a capacity for rich ambiguity and diverse meaning. Ligon joins us as he prepares to show the epic conclusion to his series Stranger, which he started in 1997, featuring excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay, Stranger in the Village, in which the American writer uses his experiences in a remote Swiss village to reflect on the nature of Blackness and the embeddedness of white supremacy, among much else. In this conversation, he discusses Baldwin and the Stranger series, along with other writers, from Gertrude Stein and Charles Dickens to Toni Morrison. He talks about his visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to draw Cézanne as a teenager, the depth and enduring power of Andy Warhol’s work and the abiding influence of David Hammons. He reflects on his musical references, from Steve Reich to Stevie Wonder, and on his interest in Korean ceramics. And, of course, he answers the questions we ask all our guests, about his daily rituals, the cultural experience that changed his view of the world and, ultimately, what art is for. This episode is sponsored by ARTIKA.
Glenn Ligon: First Contact is at Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, 17 September-23 December and a big show of his work opens at Hauser & Wirth in New York on 10 November. A new publication from Hauser & Wirth Publishers is out this autumn. A show at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, France, opens in 2022.
Links for this episode:
Glenn Ligon: First Contact at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich
James Baldwin interview in the Paris Review and Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, including the collection Notes of a Native Son, in which Stranger in the Village features
Cézanne at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cézanne Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art
Andy Warhol's Shadows at Dia Beacon
Calvin Tomkins on David Hammons in the New Yorker and Glenn Ligon’s text on Hammons, Black Light: David Hammons’s Poetics of Emptiness
Willem de Kooning's Pirate (Untitled II) (1981) at the Museum of Modern Art
Robert Mapplethorpe at the Mapplethorpe Foundation and Glenn Ligon's Notes on the Margin of the Black Book at the Guggenheim Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art
White porcelain “moon jar” at the British Museum
Extract from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man at penguin.co.uk
Zora Neale Hurston official site
Toni Morrison Society and audiobooks narrated by Toni Morrison at Audible
Édouard Glissant at Global Social Theory
Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities
DeForrest Brown Jr as Speaker Music at bandcamp
Chrissie Hynde on the Pretenders’ I’ll Stand by You
Jessye Norman on Spotify and Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder/Four Last Songs
Steve Reich’s Come Out on Spotify and a Pitchfork article on the piece and the Harlem Six
Stevie Wonder on Spotify and a link Music of My Mind, which came out when Glenn Ligon was 11 years old
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Thomas Edison and Edwin Porter at the University of Virginia’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin multimedia archive, Death of Tom by Glenn Ligon
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