by Brennen Anderson
Walk into the huge foyer, look up and left: "negro sunshine" shines down from the second story. Entitled Warm Broad Glow, artist Glenn Ligon fashioned letters from "black neon" tubes (painted black and filled with navy blue light) and yellow-white neon tubes. The dark letters seemingly cast a bright shadow. The phrase and title of the piece are appropriated from Gertrude Stein's story Melanctha.
In the catalog accompanying Ligon's exhibit, Scott Rothkopf notes that the phrase alludes to an unsettling stereotype and may seem "alien" in an art gallery. But, Rothkopf explains, "The work inverts the relationship between light and dark one expects … it casts a pall over Stein's nagging phrase."
The exhibit is a mid-career retrospective of Ligon's work, beginning with his early fascination with text. He dwelled on the dichotomy of black text on white canvas. Zora Neal Hurston's quote, "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," illustrates the multiple levels of these initial works.
Ligon uses the same stencils throughout each project, so the quality of the letters slowly degrades. Andrea Karnes, the museum's curator, explains the stencils demonstrate the "room for error and the human touch." Karnes used her extensive and intimate knowledge of the museum's space to help the artist arrange the exhibit, whose schedule includes only three cities - New York City, Fort Worth and Los Angeles.
In other works, Ligon eschews text, demonstrating his adeptness in myriad mediums. In a series of huge silkscreen prints, Ligon excerpts sections of photographs from Louis Farrakhan's 1995 Million-Man March, enlarging particular sections until they become very granulated.
In another piece inspired by the story of Henry "Box" Brown (a slave who mailed himself in a box to freedom in the north), Ligon arranges shipping boxes marked with the international symbol for fragile. In yet another project that is equal parts socio-political study and art, Ligon asked children from the Minneapolis area to color pages from a 1960's coloring book, featuring the images of famous civil rights activists.
Ligon appropriates the work of others to explore the binaries of American life and initiate a conversation - not only about otherness, but how America talks about otherness. This is evident in the exhibit's title piece, America. Karnes explained that the intent was for America to form the spine of the exhibit, so it is arranged in three recesses along a hallway that unites the many galleries in which the exhibit is situated. America is a series of three neon words, each spelling a different variation of America. Ligon explains in an interview in the exhibit's catalog that he was dwelling on the opening lines of Charles Dickens" A Tale of Two Cities. America is Ligon's poignant assessment of the best of times and worst of times in America.
The exhibit runs through June 3.
