Object Spotlight: Glenn Ligon’s Double America 2

The United States can often feel like a tale of two cities. Glenn Ligon’s (b. 1960) Double America 2 shows two Americas, one upside down. Illuminated one at a time, they represent the divisions felt by some citizens.

Ligon is a multimedia conceptual artist known for his text-based paintings and mixed-media works that examine identity through the painterly exploration of words, quotations, and literature. Born in New York City, he attended the Rhode Island School of Design and received a BA from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In 1985 he participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent study program, where he started experimenting with the incorporation of language into abstract paintings. His work has drawn from the rich texts of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor, Gertrude Stein, and others, his combination of the legible and illegible testing the limits of our language around racial and sexual identity in America.

Ligon’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has been recognized with numerous grants and awards, including from The National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Glenn Ligon lives and works in New York City.

© Glenn Ligon, courtesy of the artist; Hauser & Wirth, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Learn more http://www.glennligonstudio.com/biography https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/24240-glenn-ligon/ https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/glenn-ligon https://whitney.org/exhibitions/glenn-ligon