heartbeats

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

thegang:

The artwork of Glenn Ligon

The 49-year-old Bronx-born, queer artist is probably most famous for his text paintings, which he’s made since the ’80s, appropriating words by everyone from Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison toRichard Pryor. Sometimes a line floats in the center of the canvas, and other times it repeats manically from top to bottom, covered over in paint until it’s almost aggressively illegible. Such sentences that flicker in and out of abstraction include: I do not always feel colored and I was a nigger for twenty-three years. I gave that shit up. No Room for advancement. Clearly, Ligon relies heavily on the legacy of writers, but he also actively engages with the history of abstract painting. In other pieces, however, he takes that fight between readability and revolt away from the canvas and the oils—particularly in a number of neon works, where the white neon bar is covered over in black, giving the simultaneous sense of illumination and blackout. Recently, the artisteven entered the film business. His piece The Death of Tom is an abstractionist restaging of the last scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the silent movie filmed by Thomas Edison’s studio in 1903. Ligon asked experimental jazz musician Jason Moran to create the soundtrack for the film—“playing to the shadows,” as the young musician puts it. Here, the two talk about the importance of learning things that aren’t always written down.

(text via interview)