Glenn Ligon
(American, b. 1960)
Detail, 2014
Three color screenprint on coventry rag
9.5 x 14 in.
Gift of Charlotte and Alan Artus
This screenprint was made for Camden Arts Centre in conjunction with Ligon’s 2014-15 exhibition Call and Response, which presented a series of paintings based on the 1966 seminal taped-speech work Come Out by Minimalist composer Steve Reich. Come Out draws on the testimony of six Black youths – Wallace Baker, William Craig, Robert Felder, Donald Hamm, Robert Rice, and Walter Thomas – arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Race Riot of 1964. Known as the “Harlem Six,” they were put on trial in 1965 in a case that galvanized civil rights activists for a generation and raised awareness of police brutality against Black citizens—a persistent issue once again brought to light by the recent police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rashard Brooks, among others.
Ligon uses Reich’s overlapping repetition of words and phrases, resulting in a distortion of the text. The piece alludes to the tactics the police used to coerce and intimidate the six youths into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit.
Biography
Ligon is a visual artist working predominantly with text, and earned a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (1982). He also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, NY (1985). His work has been widely exhibited at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K.; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; Camden Arts Centre, London, U.K; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, among others. His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, Berlin Biennal, Istanbul Biennal, Documenta XI, and Gwangju Biennale. Ligon has received numerous awards and honors, including an International Association of Art Critics Award, Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting. His achievements have been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and an honorary degree from The New School, New York, NY. His works are part of major collections across the United States and Europe, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Tate Museum, London, U.K.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, which organized a midcareer retrospective of his work in 2011. Ligon is represented by Hauser & Wirth and lives in New York.
