Glenn Ligon

A collection of Black American artist Glenn Ligon’s groundbreaking text-based paintings American artist Glenn Ligon is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, which draw on the influential writings and speeches of twentieth-century historical and cultural figures, including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein. Glenn Ligon serves as an introduction to the artist’s oeuvre and accompanies a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in which his art is displayed in dialogue with objects from the Fitzwilliam and Trinity College collections selected by the artist himself. Informed by his experiences as a Black man living in New York, Ligon’s art is a sustained meditation on issues of interpretation through translation and quotation, the role of the past in the present, and the representation of the self in relation to culture and history, both as the conceptual underpinning and as a critique of modern society. His incisive text-based paintings, made since the...