Glenn Ligon
b. 1960, United States
American painter, installation artist, born 1960
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) lives and works in New York. Important recent shows include Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (2021) at the New Museum, NY, where Ligon acted as a curatorial advisor; Des Parisiens Noirs at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (2019); Blue Black (2017), an exhibition Ligon curated at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, inspired by the site-specific Ellsworth Kelly wall; and Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions (2015), a curatorial project organized with Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool. Ligon has also been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Power Plant in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others, and in 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid- career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, which traveled nationally. His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015 and 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2011), Documenta XI (2002), and Gwangju Biennale (2000).
Ligon’s work is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His awards and honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. Most recently, Ligon was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
[Courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery]