Glenn Ligon
Study for “White Series”, 1995
- Medium
- Oilstick on paper
- Dimensions
- 23 x 17.8 cm
Joseph Clark Collection · JCC-0062
About the work
Study for “White Series” brings written language and a worked surface into an intimate encounter. Made in oilstick on paper in 1995, it belongs to the context of Glenn Ligon’s White works, which explore the relationship between racial identity and the conventions of visibility. In the related painting White #19, Ligon repeatedly stencilled a passage from Richard Dyer’s essay White until accumulating marks began to obstruct the words. That interplay between recognition and resistance gives a way into this study: reading becomes a physical act of looking, while language can both disclose meaning and hold it back.
About the artist
Glenn Ligon (born New York, 1960) is an American artist whose paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, installations and neon works examine the relationships between language, history and identity. He studied at Wesleyan University and participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.
Since the late 1980s, Ligon has drawn on literary texts, political speech and popular culture, including writing by James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Genet and performances by Richard Pryor. Repeated or obscured words become material surfaces, making the effort of reading part of the encounter. His work connects this formal process with the ways race and identity are made visible, categorised or overlooked.
The Whitney’s 2011 retrospective AMERICA brought together approximately one hundred works across media, placing his development within the histories of modern painting and conceptual art. The exhibition travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The three works in the Joseph Clark Collection, dated 1995, 2021 and 2023, offer different points of entry into his sustained investigation of language, surface and perception.