Glenn Ligon is an artist who has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. As the spring 2024 guest speaker for the John A. Cooper Visiting Artist Lecture Series at AAP, Ligon will give a public artist talk on March 5. The series was created with a gift from alumnus John A. Cooper (B.F.A. '97) to bring distinguished artists of particular renown to the Ithaca campus to engage art students and the art community through lectures, studio visits, seminars, and individual critiques with B.F.A. students.

Paul Ramírez Jonas: When I met you, I think at the very end of the '80s, and you were already doing the work you are doing to this date — you've been very consistent — there was no guarantee that the idea of plurality, of multiculturalism, and making space for other folks in a white art world was going to succeed, right? It wasn't a given. And I feel that in many ways it has done so beyond any expectations I had. And yet, your work has remained like a Cassandra. When I'm thinking of the backlash we're going through, your work doesn't seem caught unaware: "Oh my God. What a surprise!" Even as you ascended into the canon of contemporary art and others came behind you, your work has remained very skeptical.

Glenn Ligon: Interesting. I think that's a good characterization of myself personally, but it's hard for me to see that in the work, though I know it must be there because it feels true to who I am and I feel like the work is not so divorced in most cases from who I imagine myself to be.

My brother and I grew up in the South Bronx and my mother sent us to a private school from first grade onwards. It was mostly white kids, and she would say things like, "White people aren't everything." So in my head when you were talking, I was thinking, "The white art world wasn't everything." There were always other art worlds, and there still are.

Part of what has been interesting to me over the past couple of years is to think about how those other art worlds function. David Hammonds was showing in the Brockman Gallery in LA in 1975, and that was a Black-owned gallery with a Black constituency. Now, I didn't say he made any money, but there were other art worlds. But at the time that I got out of school and was trying to show a bit like that, I think I was a bit myopic and thought, "Oh, there is only one art world and all those galleries are in Soho." It's like, okay, Basquiat has a gallery. Nobody else, but let's see if we can break that shit open.

I remember when I first joined Max Protetch Gallery — this was '91, '92 — and people saying to me, "Oh, you're the first, " like Jackie Robinson. And I was the first kind of, but a lot of people were like that. Lorna Simpson, you're the first in that gallery. So there was that breaking open, but you had to be a bit skeptical, I guess, because it felt like it could all be taken away, very Adrian Piper-like. Everything will be taken away, including this spotlight moment, because we've had examples of that. Artists that we celebrate now — Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten — they had lobby shows at the Whitney Museum in the seventies and then boof, you didn't hear from them, commercially, museum-wise, for 30 years.

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