COLLECTION NAME:
Visual Resources Teaching Collection
mediaCollectionId
ArtArtHiAAH~7~7
Visual Resources Teaching Collection
Collection
true
Image Record ID:
aahi0004386
image_record_id
aahi0004386
Image Record ID
false
Work Title (display):
Untitled (I AM A MAN)
Image Title:
full view
Image Date (display):
2009-04-13
Work Creator (display):
Glenn Ligon (American, born 1960)
Work Creator gender:
male
work_creator_or_agent_gender
male
Work Creator gender
false
Work Creator notes (display):
The work of Glenn Ligon mines the history of African American culture, from slave narratives to the Million Man March, from the icons of the abolitionist movement to the raunchy jokes of Richard Pryor. In the series of paintings that remain his best known, Ligon stencils black text across the surface of white, doorsize canvases. The words presented are not the artist's own but have been borrowed from such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Typically, Ligon will repeat an especially charged sentence ("How it feels to be colored me," "I am an invisible man," "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background") until it verges, through the force of excess paint, on illegibility. The resulting pictures set up a series of dialogues between visibility and erasure, between the naming of color and its painterly absence on the canvas, and between the "black space" of the stenciled letters and the "white space" into which they increasingly bleed. For all the seeming dispassion of Ligon's formal method (monochrome palette, stenciled letters, repeated words), his text paintings are supercharged with affect. They speak a first-person voice of black subjectivity while registering the denial and relentless silencing of that same voice. l Accessed 2007-10-08)
Work Creator UCB affiliation (display):
visiting artist, Visiting Artist Program, 1998
Work Style Period:
20th century
work_styleperiod
20th century
Work Style Period
false
Work Style Period:
Contemporary
work_styleperiod
Contemporary
Work Style Period
false
Work Subject:
self image
subject
self image
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
text (document genre)
subject
text (document genre)
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
racism
subject
racism
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
identity
subject
identity
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
African Americans
subject
African Americans
Work Subject
false
Work Worktype:
paintings (visual works)
work_type
paintings (visual works)
Work Worktype
false
Work Category (VRC classification):
paintings
work_category__ucbaahvrc_classification_
paintings
Work Category (VRC classification)
false
Image Rights (display):
© Glenn Ligon
Work Rights (display):
© Glenn Ligon
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Holding Institution:
University of Colorado at Boulder
Collection:
Art and Art History Visual Resources Collection
Collection info and contact:
For information about this collection, see