Detail View: Visiting Artist Lectures/Interviews:

Image Record ID: 
aahi0011938
Accessibility: 
To request captioning assistance or receive further guidance on captioning policy, please contact the IT Service Center at help@colorado.edu or call 303-735-4357 (5-HELP from a campus phone).
Work Title (display): 
Visiting Artist Lecture, Glenn Ligon
Image Title: 
video
Work Dates (display): 
April 28, 1998
Work Dates type: 
lecture
Work Creator (display): 
Glenn Ligon (American, born 1960)
Work Creator gender: 
male
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): 
1998 visiting artist, Visiting Artist Program
Work Style Period: 
20th century
Work Style Period: 
Contemporary
Work Subject: 
paintings (visual works)
Work Worktype: 
lectures
Work Category (VRC classification): 
video
Work Measurements (display): 
01:04:38
Work Location (Repository or Site) name: 
University of Colorado, Department of Art and Art History
Work Location (Repository or Site) role: 
lecture
Work Location (Geographic) name: 
Boulder, Colorado
Image Rights (display): 
© University of Colorado, Department of Art and Art History
Work Rights (display): 
© Glenn Ligon
Terms of Agreement and Conditions of Use: 
YOU AGREE: Luna Imaging's Insight Software and the digital image collection associated with it (the Software) are being provided by the University of Colorado under the following license. By obtaining, using, and/or copying this work, you (the Licensee) agree that you have read, understood, and will comply with the following terms and conditions. 1. The Software contains the University of Colorado's Department of Art and Art History's implementation of a digital image collection; 2. Any images obtained through use of the Software will be used only for non-profit, educational purposes; 3. The use of images obtained through the software will only be used while the Licensee is either: a) an employee of the University of Colorado, Metropolitan State College of Denver, or the Community College of Denver, or b) an enrolled student at the University of Colorado, Metropolitan State College of Denver, or the Community College of Denver; 4. When the Licensee is no longer an employee or student of the University of Colorado, Metropolitan State College of Denver or Community College of Denver, either by an action of the University of Colorado, Metropolitan State College of Denver or the Community College of Denver or due to actions of the Licensee, the licensee will cease to use any images exported from the Department of Art and Art History's digital image collection; 5. The Licensee agrees to indemnify the University for claims and liability arising out of the use of the Software or for any violations of this license; 6. THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO SUPPLIES THE SOFTWARE WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
CU Copyright Statement: 
The contents of the University of Colorado Digital Library are available for your use in research, teaching, and private study. Some of these items are protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.) and some items may have additional restrictions. If you use the items in this collection, make sure you abide by any restrictions stated in the descriptive data window. The nature of these collections often makes it difficult to determine the copyright status of an item. We have made every effort to provide information about copyright owners and other restrictions in the descriptive data window. Ultimately, however, it is your responsibility to use the item according to the terms governing its use. If you are a copyright holder and the information is either not listed or listed incorrectly, please let us know so that we can update the information on our site.
Holding Institution: 
University of Colorado Boulder
Collection: 
Art and Art History Visual Resources Center
Collection info and contact: 
For information about this collection, see . For specific questions, suggestions, or corrections about the descriptive data for images, contact aahvrc@colorado.edu. Please include the Image Record ID ('aahi' followed by a 7-digit number) for each image in question.