When Glenn Ligon was first invited to mount an exhibition of his text paintings, drawings and neon sculptures at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, he strolled through the neoclassical galleries on the museum’s upper floors. In the Italian Renaissance rooms, re-upholstering was underway, and it was the bare walls that caught the leading American artist’s eye. “The gold burlap wallpaper had faded to a coppery brown, except where the paintings had been peeled away,” he recalls. “I could see the original gold, and I thought, that’s the exhibition.” Ghostly traces of previous exhibitions destroyed what was meant to be a neutral backdrop for the artworks. “The museum’s job is to display things as if they were in a refrigerator, forever unchanged,” he says. “You can make other choices. There are other possibilities.”
The idea that identity, culture, and history depend on who is looking has long been central to Ligon’s work. One of his origins as an artist came in 1984 when he realized that his studio mates had never even heard of his literary idol, gay black novelist and activist James Baldwin. He began to quote Baldwin and other marginalized writers, such as Jean Genet and Zora Neale Hurston, directly, resulting in paintings that combine abstraction and identity politics that would become his signature style. Stenciled letters, pressed with blurred black pigment and coal dust to the point that the text becomes illegible, are common in his work, in part to communicate cultural invisibility. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Baldwin’s birth, and Ligon says “there’s a lot of Baldwin in this exhibition,” including a text painting that directly quotes “Stranger in the Village,” a 1953 essay in which Ligon ruminates on being the only black man in rural Switzerland.
To set the tone for the entire exhibition, Ligon installed a huge neon piece at the entrance to the Fitzwilliam, named after CP Cavafy’s 1904 poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”. The piece repeats nine different translations of the poem’s final lines reflecting on who is in and who is out, and how the definition of “us” is influenced by an othered “them”. “Who are the barbarians? It’s an interesting question in the city of Cambridge,” the artist says. “Much of the town is run by the university and off limits.”
Ligon’s response to the empty gold room is a reminder of the processes of who and what gets to be seen. He exhibited a small 16th-century painting from the museum’s collection, “The Adoration of the Magi,” in which an African king accompanies the baby Jesus. “Actually,” he points out, “originally the label on the painting said the attendants were black, but now it just says the Magi, and they’ve been reinstated as white. But to me they look like brothers.”
Art and inspiration:
Photo: © Glenn Ligon; Provided by De Ying Foundation
Glenn Ligon’s “Untitled (I See Color Best When Thrown Against a White Background),” 1990
Executed in Ligon’s signature style, this text painting borrows from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay, “What it Feels like to be a Colored Person.” At first, black stenciled letters on a white background provide a visual representation of the quote, but the increasingly blurred letters break down binary thinking to reveal something hazy and uncertain.
Photo: © Glenn Ligon, courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery, London. Photographer credit: Natalia Tsoukala, courtesy of NEON
Glenn Ligon’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” (installation view), 2021, Portals, Greek Parliament + Neon, Former Public Tobacco Factory, Athens
It’s one element of Ligon’s giant nine-part neon installation, which quotes nine different translations of the final line of Cavafys’ famous poem. It grew out of Ligon’s interest in translation and the impossibility of smoothly translating one language into another, especially when it comes to something as nuanced as poetry.
Photo: Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Horace, Opera; Persius, Saturae; Theodulus, Eclogae; Cato, De Moribus, 12th century.
The 12th-century Horatius poem collection, annotated in illegible alphabet-shaped microscript, will be exhibited alongside the 2000 diptych “Condition Report,” a reproduction of a 1988 work that uses the famous statement “I am a human being” made by black Memphis sanitation workers during the 1968 strike, but with later annotations by the museum’s conservators.
Photo: Andrew Norman/© Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Jan Bruegel the Elder’s “Ceramic Vase with Flowers”, c.1607-1608
Bruegel’s still lifes boast the potential of art to freeze the process of the blossoming and decay of life: the collected flowers are pictorial compositions in themselves, flowering at different times of the year. What is particularly interesting to Ligon is that these familiar European flower paintings were the product of cultural exchange and imperial trade routes: many flowers were brought from Asia.
Photo: Christopher Burke/© Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon’s Negro Sunshine (Red) #15 2019 Research
Ligon first used the phrase “Negro Sunshine” as a black neon light in 2005. It draws from Gertrude Stein’s racial character studies, but the expression has its own subversive resonance, collapsing boundaries and dissolving opposites of darkness and light.
Glenn Ligon’s exhibition All Over the Place runs at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge until 2 March 2025.
