Glenn Ligon (born 1960, pronounced Lie-gōne) is an American conceptual artist whose work explores race, language, desire, sexuality, and identity.

[5] While he started his career as an abstract painter, he began to introduce text and words into his work during the mid-1980s in order to better express his political concerns and ideas about racial identity.

[6] Ligon gained prominence in the early 1990s, along with a generation of artists including Janine Antoni, Renée Green, Marlon Riggs, Gary Simmons, and Lorna Simpson.

Although Ligon's work spans sculptures, prints, drawings, mixed media and neon, painting remains a core activity.

He has incorporated texts into his paintings, in the form of literary fragments, jokes, and evocative quotes from a selection of authors, which he stencils directly onto the canvas by hand.

[1] This show established Ligon's reputation for creating large, text-based paintings in which a phrase chosen from literature or other sources is repeated continuously.

Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988), a reinterpretation of the signs carried during the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968 — made famous by Ernest Withers's photographs of the march — is the first example of his use of text.

[16] Ligon's Prologue Series #2 (1991) includes the opening text of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, stenciled in various shades of black and grey, the words becoming less discernible as they progress towards the bottom of the composition.

This series began in 1996 with selected excepts rendered in Ligon's stenciling technique that gradually reduces the legibility of the text on the canvas.

Though recognizable as letters, the stenciled shapes also stack and layer on the canvas, furthering Ligon's career long engagement with issues of legibility, and tension between figuration and abstraction.

To incorporate this element, Ligon placed speakers inside the crates quietly playing songs such as "Strange Fruit" sung by Billie Holiday and "Sound of da Police" by KRS-one.

The juxtaposition of all of the songs, spanning a century, is an auditory element which creates a chorus across time, further exposing the lasting effects of slavery.

Between them are two more rows of small framed typed texts, 78 comments on sexuality, race, AIDS, art and the controversy over Mapplethorpe's work that was launched by then-Texas Congressman Dick Armey.

Warm Broad Glow (2005), Ligon's first exploration in neon, uses a fragment of text from Three Lives, the 1909 novel by American author Gertrude Stein.

[24] Ligon's large-scale installation A Small Band (2015) consists of three neon pieces illuminating the words "blues," "blood," and "bruise."

The three words of A Small Band reference composer Steve Reich's 1966 sound piece Come Out, which looped a fragment of the recorded testimony of Daniel Hamm, who was one of the Harlem Six, a group of young black men wrongly accused and convicted of murder in the mid-1960s.

Des Parisiens Noirs (2019) is an installation depicting the names of 13 Black models from historic paintings which was presented on an interior facade of the Musée d'Orsay, in Paris.

In 2021, Ligon was commissioned to create Waiting for the Barbarians for the exhibition Portals organized by the Hellenic Parliament and NEON Archived September 21, 2021, at the Wayback Machine in the atrium of the former Public Tobacco Factory in Athens, Greece.

Embracing this apparent failure, Ligon decided to show his film as an abstract progression of light and shadow with a narrative suggested by the score composed and played by jazz musician Jason Moran.

In 2012, Ligon was commissioned to create the first site-specific artwork for the New School's University Center building, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, on the corner of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village.

The work, For Comrades and Lovers (2015), features about 400 feet of text from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass rendered in violet neon light, running around the top of a wall in the center's first-floor café.

[7] The text in the selected painting is from John Howard Griffin's 1961 memoir Black Like Me, the account of a white man's experiences traveling through the South after he had his skin artificially darkened.

The words "All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence" are repeated in capital letters that progressively overlap until they coalesce as a field of black paint.