23 Facts About Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon is noted as one of the originators of the term Post-Blackness.

Glenn Ligon was born in 1960 in the Forest Houses Projects in the south Bronx.

Glenn Ligon enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he spent two years before transferring to Wesleyan University.

Glenn Ligon continues to live and work in New York City.

Glenn Ligon gained prominence in the early 1990s, along with a generation of artists including Janine Antoni, Renee Green, Marlon Riggs, Gary Simmons, and Lorna Simpson.

Glenn Ligon has served on the board of directors of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Glenn Ligon currently serves on the Board of directors for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Pulitzer Foundation, and LAXART.

Glenn Ligon's work is greatly informed by his experiences as a gay African American man living in the United States.

Glenn Ligon has incorporated texts into his paintings, in the form of literary fragments, jokes, and evocative quotes from a selection of authors, which he stencils directly onto the canvas by hand.

In 1993, Glenn Ligon began his series of paintings based on Richard Pryor's groundbreaking stand-up comedy routines from the 1970s.

Glenn Ligon took note of how Brown was allegedly singing when he arrived in Philadelphia.

Glenn Ligon asked friends to describe him and then included these descriptions as text in a series of posters depicting himself as a runaway slave in the style of 19th-century broadsheets circulated to advertise for the return of fugitive slaves.

Glenn Ligon cut pages from Black Book and framed 91 photographs, installing them in two horizontal rows.

Glenn Ligon made these pictures public in presentation, in a museum: Glenn Ligon forced viewers to look at these images in a room full of others.

Glenn Ligon rendered the words "negro sunshine" in warm white neon, the letters of which were then painted black on the front.

In 2021, Glenn Ligon was commissioned to create Waiting for the Barbarians for the exhibition Portals organized by the Hellenic Parliament and NEON Archived September 21,2021, at the Wayback Machine in the atrium of the former Public Tobacco Factory in Athens, Greece.

In 2008, Glenn Ligon completed a short film entitled The Death of Tom.

In 2011 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective of Ligon's work, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Glenn Ligon has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Power Plant Archived September 22,2021, at the Wayback Machine in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.

Glenn Ligon's work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, Berlin Biennal, Istanbul Biennal, Documenta XI, and Gwangju Biennale.

In 2003, Glenn Ligon was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

In 2018, Glenn Ligon was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The New School.

In 2021, Glenn Ligon was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.