Continue playing
(Time remaining: )
Play from beginning
Continue playing "{{ controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].segmentParentTitle}}"
{{controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].title}} has ended.
Glenn Ligon in "History"
A retrospective of artist Glenn Ligon’s work at the Whitney Museum provides a backdrop for his personal history growing up in New York, as well as for the disparate influences that contribute to his mature work—from DeKooning, to children’s coloring books of the 1970’s, to classics of American literature by writers such as Gertrude Stein or Zora Neale Hurston.
More information and creditsCredits
Series Created By: Susan Dowling & Susan Sollins. Executive Producer & Curator: Susan Sollins. Series Producer: Eve Moros Ortega. Associate Curator: Wesley Miller. Director of Production: Nick Ravich. Production Coordinator: Ian Forster. Consulting Director: Charles Atlas. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Director of Photography: Paul Gibson & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Patrick Christensen, Judy Karp, Mark Mandler, & Roger Phenix. Gaffer: Alan Hostetter. Key Grip: Anthony Mussolino. Best Boy: Chris Caiati & Brian Sachson. Production Assistant: Steven Klink & Logan Needle. Makeup: Eddie Casson. Assistant Editor: Crystal De Boulet, Dahlia Fischbein, Bahron Thomas, & Alex Zustra.
Art Direction and Design: Open, New York. Online Editor: Don Wyllie. Composer: Peter Foley. Voiceover Artist: Jace Alexander. Sound Editor: Margaret Crimmins & Greg Smith. Sound Mix: Cory Melious. Sound Assistant: Steve Giammaria. Artwork Animation: Frank Ferrigno. Graphics Animation: Urosh Perishic.
Artworks Courtesy of: Marina Abramović; Glenn Ligon; Mary Reid Kelley; Fredericks & Freiser, New York; Pilar Corrias Gallery, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Archival Footage & Photography Courtesy of: Bettmann/CORBIS & Mary Reid Kelley.
Special Thanks: The Art21 Board of Trustees; Bill Abdale; Mick Bello; Tanya Brodsky; Eric Brucker; Pat Casteel; Rick Compeau; Ralph Cuccurullo; Matt Dilling; Keith Eland; EMPAC, Troy, New York; Gary Hahn; Erin Jones; Patrick Kelley; Samara Levenstein; Lite Brite Neon; Sheila Lynch; Danica Newell; Graham Newhall; Jim Powell; Micah Pruisner; Juliet Reid; Alice Reid Pruisner; Scott Rothkopf; Beau Rutland; Keith Shapiro; Peter Superti; Stefan Superti; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Steve Wylie; & Nora York.
Curatorial Advisory Council: Rachel Blackburn Cozad, Kris Douglas, Gary Garrels, Karen Higa, Margo Machida, Marti Mayo, Jill Medvedow, Anne Pasternack, John Ravenal, Paul Schimmel, Katy Siegel, & Judith Tannenbaum.
Additional Art21 Staff: Daniel Barrett, Carrie Caroselli, KC Forcier, Joe Fusaro, Jessica Hamlin, Claudine Isé, Marc Mayer, Jonathan Munar, Heather Reyes, Kelly Shindler, Sara Simonson, & Diane Vivona.
Interns: Alex Abelson, Paulina V. Ahlstrom, Don Edler, Lucy Healy-Kelly, Clara Jo, David Levine, Maren Miller, Molly Nathan, Tayo Ogunbiyi, & Persis Singh. Bookkeeper: Valerie Riley.
Public Relations: DKC Public Relations. Station Relations: De Shields Associates, Inc. Legal Counsel: Albert Gottesman.
Major underwriting for Season 6 of Art in the Twenty-First Century is provided by The National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, Agnes Gund, Bloomberg, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Broad Art Foundation, The Japan Foundation, Toby Devan Lewis.
Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian
Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide. Translate this video now.
Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.
Glenn Ligon’s paintings and sculptures examine cultural and social identity through found sources—literature, Afrocentric coloring books, photographs—to reveal the ways in which the history of slavery, the civil rights movement, and sexual politics inform our understanding of American society. Ligon appropriates texts from a variety of literary writers including Walt Whitman, Zora Neal Hurston, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. In Ligon’s paintings, the instability of his medium—oil crayon used with letter stencils—transforms the texts he quotes, making them abstract, difficult to read, and layered in meaning, much like the subject matter that he appropriates. In other works that feature silkscreen, neon, and photography, Ligon threads his own image and autobiography into symbols that speak to collective experiences.
“I didn’t really do drawings when I was a kid. I made copies of things.”
Glenn Ligon
Artist at Work
History Reimagined
Kara Walker
Eleanor Antin
