Exhibit of the week: Glenn Ligon: AMERICA

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Through June 5

Glenn Ligon has always deserved better than to be lumped together with his more strident peers, said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. This “star of the era of identity politics” emerged in the late 1980s, producing work whose distinctiveness, at the time, wasn’t immediately easy to see. In his paintings and installations, this Bronx, N.Y.–born Wesleyan University grad “makes combative points of being black and being gay,” and he often uses borrowed text to help do so. But a smartly curated mid-career retrospective at the Whitney shows Ligon to have always been more a “companionable” seeker than a scold. A series of his paintings that are built around jokes from Richard Pryor’s profane stand-up act offers a key: His provocations are designed, as Pryor’s were, to “burn to a core of humanity from which all customary divisions among people appear ridiculous.”

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Ligon actually dislikes the very idea of “making a statement,” said Emily Stokes in the Financial Times. A characteristic Ligon is “both light and dark,” amusing and slightly enraged. He seeks ambiguity and the myriad responses ambiguity triggers. His first works to appear at the Whitney, back in 1991, featured phrases taken from 1920s writer Zora Neale Hurston and stenciled on hollow-core doors. Read one: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” Two years later, he pulled from Robert Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre a series of homoerotic images of naked black men, then paired each photo with commentary by other artists, by queer theorists, by Christian leaders. “We don’t agree on what images mean,” he says. “That’s their power.” At the entrance of this show, he’s had a 22-foot-long neon sign installed. It reads: “negro sunshine.”

“Like everything” Ligon makes, that sign “can be read in different ways,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. One obvious goal of the retrospective is to show today’s tastemakers that Ligon has been “a craft-conscious painter” whenever he’s picked up a brush. In 1988, when he reinterpreted a famous civil-rights-era placard that read, “I Am a Man,” he somehow made it a “semi-abstract painting”—a “new kind of object.” Today, one of Ligon’s 1992 paintings is hanging in the White House, which could lead some Whitney visitors to decide that “negro sunshine” is mostly a happy reference to a “loosening up” in cultural attitudes since the 1980s. Then again, “the probity and plentitude” of Ligon’s art is a kind of sunshine in itself.