Although it refers back to America’s slave-holding past and forward to the Obama presidency, Glenn Ligon’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art focuses on the late 1980s and 1990s, a too-seldomrevisited stretch of recent art.
Mr. Ligon, 50, was born in the Bronx section of New York. He did his first breakout work in 1985, when a new generation of black artists was rewriting scripts about race. H e painted in a brushy, abstract expressionist mode. But he was acutely aware, as a gay black man, of the political ferment around him. His problem became how to make the language of painting expressive of who, and what, he was.
His initial solution was to keep painting, but to add words: anecdotes lifted from gay pornography and incised into his pigmentswiped surfaces.
The words were a defacement, but they were also a territorial marker . Since then Mr. Ligon has emerged as an artist who is equally an object maker and a conceptualist, as interested in the past as in the present, as much a craftconscious painter as a social commentator.
In 1988 Mr. Ligon made a series of paintings using epigrammatic passages taken from dream-interpretation guides popular among African-Americans when he was growing up. This series would be his last use of color in text painting for quite a while, with the exception of a group of pictures based on scabrous racial jokes by the comedian Richard Pryor done in eye-aching complementaries (electric blue on bright red, etc.). Black and white would become the norm, and stenciling a primary expressive medium.
In several paintings beginning in 1990 Mr. Ligon covered wooden doors or door-shaped canvases with stenciled sentences pulled from different sources: an autobiographical essay by Zora Neale Hurston (“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”); Genet’s play “The Blacks” (“I’m Turning Into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going to Haunt You”); a poem by Jesse Jackson (“I Am Somebody”).
In the late 1990s Mr. Ligon borrowed Andy Warhol’s silk-screenpainting format in a set of largescale photographic images of the 1995 Million Man March on Washington, an event that promoted black male solidarity but was pointedly unwelcoming to gay men.
In two installations he leaves painting behind altogether. One, “To Disembark,” from 1993, is based on a 19th-century account by a slave named Henry Brown, known as Box, of his escape from captivity by having himself mailed from Virginia to Philadelphia in a wooden crate.
Four shipping crates sit in a Whitney gallery; from inside one comes the voice of Billie Holiday singing the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit.” On the walls hang a series of witty, sometimes chilling “wanted” posters for fugitive slaves, with Mr. Ligon himself the runaway subject.
The retrospective, on view until June 5, ends as it started, with words. A big one, “America” is spelled out three times in neon , each version slightly different, none quite right. One has backward letters, another flickers ; the third is painted black and emits only pinpoints of light. There’s a fourth neon piece downstairs , consisting of the words “Negro Sunshine” - the phrase is Gertrude Stein’s - and facing the street.
“Negro Sunshine” can be read in different ways. It can evoke the optimism that greeted the Obama presidency but that now can seem hard to sustain. Or it can refer to a loosening up in American attitudes toward race and gender.
Or it can express a viewer’s appreciation of the probity and plentitude of Mr. Ligon’s art.
HOLLAND COTTER REVIEW
