A collection of Black American artist Glenn Ligon’s groundbreaking text-based paintings

American artist Glenn Ligon is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, which draw on the influential writings and speeches of twentieth-century historical and cultural figures, including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein. Glenn Ligon serves as an introduction to the artist’s oeuvre and accompanies a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in which his art is displayed in dialogue with objects from the Fitzwilliam and Trinity College collections selected by the artist himself.

Informed by his experiences as a Black man living in New York, Ligon’s art is a sustained meditation on issues of interpretation through translation and quotation, the role of the past in the present, and the representation of the self in relation to culture and history, both as the conceptual underpinning and as a critique of modern society. His incisive text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, highlight the social, linguistic, and political constructions of race, gender, and sexuality.

By exploring Ligon’s curatorial practice alongside his artworks, the exhibition showcases the ideas of one of the most significant Black artists working today in direct dialogue with museological tradition. Issues such as art making and aesthetics, as well as broader questions about race and its sociopolitical implications, are further developed in the catalogue, which includes essays and conversations between Ligon and a range of museum curators.