The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 4 with Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon makes art that asks us to look again. An artist, writer, and curator, his practice moves between the studio and the gallery, the page and the public sphere, spanning painting, neon, print, installation, and beyond. From text-based canvases grounded in the words of James Baldwin to glowing neons that play with the idea of America, and from intimate drawings to monumental works, Ligon explores disappearance, distance, and what happens when language is obscured or transformed.
In this conversation, he reflects on the through-lines in his work: from artistic heroes to navigating institutional blind spots, to thinking about the role of artists as citizens. He shares the advice he’d give his younger self and the doubts that continue to drive him forward.
This is a conversation about art and history, about freedom and responsibility.
What if the real work of artists is to imagine the future we don’t yet know how to describe?
Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast all about imagining new and different futures.
[Audio of guests saying “what if?”]
I’m your host Charlotte Burns and I’m thrilled to be joined by one of my favorite artists, Glenn Ligon. He has spent more than three decades making art that asks us to look again at the surface, at language, and at the history and conditions we accept.
An artist, writer, and curator, his practice moves between the studio and the gallery, the page and the public sphere. Spanning painting, neon, print, installation, and sometimes sculpture, he creates art across disciplines, media, and scale, from intimate to monumental. From text-based canvas grounded in the work of James Baldwin, to glowing neons that play with words and nationhood, to exhibitions that rethink museum practice. Glenn’s art is rooted in questions of disappearance and distance. And in what happens when language is obscured or is changed.
In this episode, he talks about the throughlines in his work, from his artistic heroes to navigating institutional blind spots and thinking about the role of artists as citizens. He shares the advice he’d give his younger self and younger artists, and the doubts that still drive him forward.
This is a conversation about art and history, about freedom and responsibility. Glenn asks, “what if the real work of art and artists is to imagine the future we don’t yet know how to describe?”
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Let’s dive in.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Glenn, thank you so much for joining me. It's such a pleasure to be in conversation with you. I'm very excited.
Glenn Ligon: I am too. Thank you for inviting me.
Charlotte Burns: Well, thank you very much for being here.
What I think I want to start talking to you about is the beginning and the kind of recurring theme in your work.
You've said that seeing Warhol's Shadow[s] paintings in 1979 made you realize that “if disappearance could be a subject matter, I could be an artist.” And you've described disappearance “as a constant theme” in your work, in your Walking in Memphis essay. You've also described the use of stencils in your text-based paintings as a way to introduce a bit of distance.
I wanted to ask you how your understanding of disappearance and distance, as both a formal strategy and a conceptual framework, has evolved over the years.
Glenn Ligon: Well, I think, initially I started out as a painter, and I do other things now: neons, installations, video occasionally. But, as you said, one of the earliest kind of impulses in my work after seeing that Warhol installation of his Shadow paintings was to think about what it means to be a subject that is not there in some sense.
Warhol is famously there and not there, famously all surface. And that's not quite the trajectory that I was on. But in a way, this sort of question of disappearance is in response initially, in the beginning of my career, to a particular cultural moment. Multiculturalism, the explosion at that moment, and we're talking the mid ‘80s, late ‘80s, of artists of color showing in museums and galleries. But it came with a kind of demand, I think. A demand that artists of color make work that visibly, and upfrontedly, if that's a word, displays their difference.
So, a lot of the work was figurative, a lot of the work dealt with important questions around identity, and certainly my work participated in that, but I think my impulse from the beginning, because I was so interested in language, was not to figure the body, but to talk about the body. And I very early on realized that using text from authors such as James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston or [Walt] Whitman or Gertrude Stein was a way to talk about questions of race and identity without actually figuring the body.
So, in some ways, the use of stencils, the use of quotations was all about a kind of distancing from this notion of autobiography. And I would say also that often I would read critics who would say about the work of artists of color that work is about their identity. And that would be the end of the discussion as if identity or race were something that was fully known and knowable, and evident in the work. And as if that were the only things that work could or should be about.
And so the use of text for me, the use of stencils, the use of quotations was a way of distancing myself, of withdrawing from that kind of discourse around the work.
Charlotte Burns: It reminds me of something you wrote about in your brilliant essay on Felix González-Torres, which I have to say made me so jealous as a writer because the construction of the essay is so brilliant. You ground it in your admiration for Felix by telling us that you created your own version of his work, Untitled (Perfect Lovers) by creating two identical battery operated clocks hung side by side.
In the year he died, 1996, you hung it in your studio and say that you were reminded of the “economy, toughness and beauty of his multifaceted practice. Its wit and generosity, its impact on us all”, which makes the reader think that you knew him and then you tell us quickly you didn't know him, you didn't know him at all, but that he's “our Felix.” There's this affection and generosity towards the artist.
You talk about a publication of his that you say is a new model, and then you very tenderly, almost, critique it. You write that “when the culture foregrounds something, it is because the thing is needed. And that one has the sense that he was the artist that everyone in the early 1990s was waiting for: articulate, bright, clean, and a nice looking guy. Felix was the artist of color whom curators and critics buzzed into corridors of power while the angry torture issue wielding others were told to go around to the service entrance or wait by the cloak room.”
And then writing about the anthology, you say that those who write about his work tend not to discuss his relationship to multicultural or identity art. They simply repeat that he was careful in his practice to avoid being labeled but that they don't really consider that the space in which those supposedly reductive categories aimed to open up. And I was really interested to read that.
I wanted to ask you what you think the culture needs from artists right now. What the culture you think is fore-grounding, and also how artists can navigate those corridors of power without being co-opted.
Glenn Ligon: Hmm. Big question.
Well, there are a couple of things about that Felix essay. There's some little jokes in there. The quote about him being clean, articulate, and a nice looking guy is what Biden said about Barack Obama. This is the acceptable face of Blackness, Barack Obama. Which was a problematic statement because certainly, there were other politicians perfectly qualified to run for President. They had just never been platformed the way Obama had been. So, for Biden to say, “Oh, he's the only one,” was problematic.
But also, I just think that Felix threaded a careful line in terms of he didn't want his practice to be reduced in some ways. Which is interesting to think about. Is Felix a Cuban artist? Because it was this moment of multiculturalism, it was a moment when artists of color were expected to perform certain kinds of identities and Felix's work, in some ways, refuses that in the same way that it refuses, in some ways, the performance of gayness, queerness.
I remember Felix in some interview talking about a show he had at Washington D.C. at the Hirshhorn Museum. And it was this moment when there's this outrage about gay artists, queer artists having shows and getting federal tax dollars for it. And Felix says, “Oh yeah. And then they come to my show and all they see is like two clocks hanging on the wall, or two mirrors.” There's nothing to talk about.
Of course there is a lot to talk about but it's not coded in a way that can be used in these very simplistic, “Oh, look, ‘queer art, two men kissing.’ It's like no, two clocks on the wall called [Untitled] Perfect Lovers.”
Charlotte Burns: His show's in DC right now, and it's not been critiqued in the same way…
Glenn Ligon: Right. Because there's nothing to say: it's a string of lights. It's a paper stack. It doesn't reduce itself to easy readings or easy parodies. So, it is very interesting that that work is at a museum where the director just quit.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Glenn Ligon: Forced out, some would say, by the Trump administration. It's the same museum [laughs] that Felix’s show had his work.
Charlotte Burns: It's the same museum and the same work. I know. Thinking about that, reading it again in preparation for this was so interesting.
And, I read with such admiration in the writing is that you move from what seems like an homage to then the moments of almost ambiguous blankness in the work, that is a kind of critique of saying nothing allows a projection. And the times when there's a lack of specificity in that work and how artists thread that needle, how Felix threads that needle.
Glenn Ligon: Well, I think one of the things that you talked about, Felix's generosity, and one of the things that prompted me to title the essay “My Felix”, was that generosity in that you could go to our hardware store or office supply store and buy two clocks and put them on your wall and you would have a Felix.
And I knew many people who had done that, who had a paper stack, in their house or, had done a version of Felix work as a homage. And the fact that Felix's paper stacks were meant to be taken, meant for the viewer to take home. Felix talks about seeing kids take off of one of his paper stack pieces and saying, “Oh, for many of them, it's the first art they've ever owned.”
And that kind of generosity is interesting to me and subversive in some ways. Like usually the museum, you don't get to touch art. Felix said touch it. You don't get to take it home. Felix says take it home. It makes the museum have to navigate, perpetually, what it means to have a piece by the artist. The stacks have to be reprinted so that the more viewers take them, they have to be reprinted. So, the institution is always engaged in the stewardship of the piece. It's not just like, “Oh, it's here, we own it, and that's that”.So, there are many ways that his work has been inspiring. But you asked a question about what's demanded of artists at this moment and it's a complicated moment. And I think artists are responding to it in different ways. One way I would say, this is not a demand on the artist, but something I've noticed, particularly of artists of color, is their generosity around setting up institutions, foundations, residency programs.
So, I'm thinking of Denniston Hill, started by Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer. I'm thinking of Mark Bradford's Art + Practice. I'm thinking of NXTHVN, Titus Kaphar. [Indistinct] is setting up a residency program in on the continent in Africa. Michael Armitage, the painter, also setting up a residency program.
And it's fascinating to me. These are relatively young artists and I think they have the sense of service, of a necessity that needs to be filled. And they're successful enough in their career that they feel like they can put their own resources into making these things happen, for making these programs for other artists. So, I think that's a response to a moment, not a demand. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Glenn Ligon: Nobody says you have to do this, but I think that is a response to a need, and artists being generous with their resources and showing a sort of commitment to younger generations of artists, too.
Charlotte Burns: I think the key word there is ‘need’. To identify the need. Something I've been thinking a lot about with those models, which truly are generous and generative and innovative, thinking of two things really. A lot of the growth of those organizations or entities or spaces was because of market conditions that have been really specific to the past couple of generations. There has been an unprecedented growth in the contemporary market, so artists have used their own power to create new models. And essentially it's a response to the failure of the art world or the art industry that they operate in, that they've seen that need, that they've seen those gaps and created those things.
And I wonder about the sustainability of that going forward because of two things.
One, the art market isn't in that moment now and two, the art industry, rather than reacting to artists creating these brilliant institutions essentially, by supporting them in a more robust way by providing another layer underneath them is just going, “Oh wow, that's great. That's innovative. Well done. Off you go.” Rather than saying, “Okay, how do we help you sustain this? How do we build another layer underneath this to make this something that you don't have to carry in addition to your artistic practice?”
Glenn Ligon: Right. Yeah. It's a complicated space to operate in. I think that you're right, as the fortunes in the art market rise and fall—right now everyone's fortune is falling a bit—it is a difficult situation for artists who started organizations with their own resources to sustain that.
And I would say there's a difference between something like what Lauren Halsey is doing in Los Angeles, which is more community-focused, because I think she thinks of it as part of her artistic practice. And I think other things like Denniston Hill or Mark Bradford's Art + Practice are different from what they do as artists.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Glenn Ligon: Do you know what I mean?
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Glenn Ligon: So, that is maybe one distinction.
But, these organizations have also tapped into the philanthropic world. They write for grants from foundations. And that's another difficulty they're gonna have to navigate because foundations have shifted their priorities. I'm on several boards of nonprofits, and I've seen it over the last year or two, that the shift in priorities in terms of funding, the sort of the sun-setting of certain kinds of funding initiatives.
And so, in a way, artists have to be professional non-profit administrators to navigate this field because it is not sustainable, as you said, for the work to be totally financing these organizations. It just puts too much pressure on the artists to produce work that sells to fund something else, rather than…
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Glenn Ligon: …do the work you wanna make.
So, it is a tough moment. It is a tough moment.
Charlotte Burns: Can you speak a little more to the philanthropy side of things? I know you're on several boards, like you say. How have you experienced that shifting of priorities?
Glenn Ligon: Well, I think partially, it's coming from the artists themselves.
I'm on the [Robert] Rauschenberg [Foundation] board and we had an artist council, and the artist council had their own funding, so they could decide what organizations they wanted to fund, outside of any approval by the rest of the board.
And that was an amazing thing because rarely do artists get in the position of actually giving out money. They're usually in advisory capacity in relationship to these foundations. So, this was set up by Kathy Halbreich, who had retired from MoMA and became director of the Rauschenberg Foundation. She set up this artist council.
But the artists themselves were funding things like housing initiatives, Moms 4 Housing, an organization in Oakland that had taken over abandoned housing in the city and claimed it because there was a dire need for housing. So, why are these empty houses just sitting there?
So, that was one of the initiatives that the artist council funded. That's not art, [laughs] but I realized just listening to their conversations that social justice, Native rights, water issues like Flint, that's the subject of art for them. So, they weren't making those distinctions that maybe I, as an older generation, was making between art and not art.
Think about an artist like Pope.L, who did so much around water contamination in Flint, Michigan.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Glenn Ligon: That was art. That wasn't social work, he was making art. But making art that had a very direct impact on the lives of people in Flint, through the sale of work to fund certain initiatives there. So, I think it's really interesting that those divisions between things for younger artists aren't so rigid.
Charlotte Burns: Has that changed your practice? Has that changed the way you see your art?
Glenn Ligon: It's made me want to be more philanthropic. It's made me realize that the boards I'm on, I have to dive into. One is a dance company, one is a nonprofit in LA and I'm still on the Rauschenberg board. So, just to be more committed to what it means to be of service through that. And Rauschenberg is a grant-giving organization, so there's a direct correlation between my participation and the grants that we give out.
So, yeah, it's made me more aware of the rigidity in some ways, of my thinking about what's art and what's not art.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Glenn Ligon: And I think that younger artists don't have that kind of rigidity. But also I think they're, yeah, they're just interested in how to be a whole person as an artist.
I have a friend in Canada, Stephen Andrews, who says, “Oh, when people ask me what I do and I say, I'm an artist, a blank look comes on their face because most people don't know what artists do.” But then he says, “I've started to say, ‘I'm a citizen. I use my artwork to talk about issues that citizens need to think about, like democracy, government, fairness, equity.’”
Charlotte Burns: That's interesting that you would create that distinction in your own art because you've written about other artists.
Julie Mehretu, when you wrote an essay about her art, you said “an artist, after all, is a citizen, not only of the nation in which they reside, but of the world. And as a citizen, Mehretu has seen it as her duty over the course of her career to witness and to act.” And I noted that down because, in that same essay, you quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his “refusal to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.” And, because you are a witness to history in your work and have been through these decades. So, it's interesting that you would see that rigid delineation. Because I have a note here being like, “Ask Glenn about citizens”, since it's there in your work.
[Laughter]
And so, yeah. I wanna ask you about that. Where is that delineation in your mind? Is it about being a witness? Is it about being a participant? Where is that delineation?
Glenn Ligon: I think it comes from listening to and learning from younger artists and realizing that in some ways the field in which I operate is small compared to the field in which they want to operate.
Not everybody can start a nonprofit, not everyone can do a Denniston Hill or a NXTHVN or Art + Practice, so that's not in my personality. But I think what I'm talking about is that commitment to, on a broad level, reaching out to the community around…
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Glenn Ligon: …them as artists, being engaged internationally with issues, not just locally.
I don't know, their sense of politics, their sense of engagement, it just feels different than mine. But as you said, I am interested in and engaged with history, and maybe that's why someone like Baldwin comes up as a touchstone for me so often because he had this sort of particular kind of engagement with history and the moment and the necessity to be a witness.
I just saw last night a concert by Meshell Ndegeocello at the venue on the waterfront in New York City, and it was dedicated to James Baldwin and it was called, No More Water: the Gospel of James Baldwin. Fantastic title.
Charlotte Burns: That is such a great title.
Glenn Ligon: [Laughs] We're just in the fire [Laughs] now. No more water. We're just in the fire.
But thinking about James Baldwin as this fiery critic of America, and masculinity and all sorts of things. So, he has been a touchstone for a model for a kind of citizenship for me.
[Musical interlude]Charlotte Burns: During the pandemic, you tackled Baldwin's essay, “Stranger in the Village” in its entirety, making a vast 45-foot painting using that complete essay rather than fragments, and I was interested that you said you'd done that because of the pandemic, that because coworkers in your studio space didn't come into the studio, so you'd had this vast space.
So, thinking about disappearance, that when those coworkers disappeared, the work was able to come forward. And you said, “I feel like I'm at the end of this investigation. It's taken me all these many years to get to this point to see if I can tackle all of Baldwin.” And I read that and I thought, do you really feel like you're done with Baldwin and that essay, you're at the end of that investigation? Do you feel like you are? It's been such an important touchstone for you through these many years. Did that painting get you to somewhere, or do you feel like there's more to be done with that text?
Glenn Ligon: Oh, no, there's definitely more. Never say it's over. And in fact, I've done two of those paintings, and the third one is on its way for a show at the National Gallery [of Art] in Washington, eventually.
But, thinking about Julie Mehretu again, we did a talk a couple of years ago at the Walker Art Center around her retrospective. Julie asked me to be in dialogue with her, and at the beginning of that talk, the curator of the show did an introduction of Julie's work and did a land acknowledgement as many organizations were doing, acknowledging the Native land that the museum sat on. And as we were talking, Julie and I, I was thinking about that land acknowledgement and realizing like Julie, in particular bodies of paintings, starts with an image of a conflict: Tarhir Square, Aleppo, Ferguson. Those images are the ground on which she makes her marks.
So, it starts with this abstracted image of this kind of protest history. And then she starts making marks on top of that. And I thought, “Oh, that's so interesting that the world, those conflicts, are the ground on which she makes her paintings.”
Extrapolating from that, I was thinking Baldwin in some ways, particularly that essay “Stranger in the Village” is for me, after so many years, like the ground that I make my work on top of. It's so embedded and I'm so identified with it that, in a way, it's become a way to get somewhere else, using the text as a ground.
And it's very important that it is a ground for me, that it structures kind of how I'm making a painting. But it's not so important to me that every single word is visible, that the text of Baldwin's essay is there visible in the painting, because the text of Baldwin's essays are available in the world.
And also, I guess because, when I first started—I've told this story many times—started thinking about Baldwin in the ‘80s, I was in a program called the Whitney Independent Study Program here in New York City and we had all this complicated reading of psychoanalytic theory and post-structuralist theory, and also reading [Jacques] Lacan and [Jean-Martin] Charcot and all these things and it was just head bangers.
So, I was talking to the person I was sharing my studio space with that, because this material was new for me, I was having a lot of difficulty with it. And as a palette cleanser, I was reading some James Baldwin essays and she turned to me and said, “James Baldwin, who's that?” And it wasn't a shock that she'd never read James Baldwin, it's just she'd never heard the name. But she knew who Charcot was. She knew who, you know, [Michel] Foucault was. She knew who all the -caults were, but she had never heard of James Baldwin.
And so, in some ways, that sparked this idea of like, well, you've never heard who Baldwin is, or Zora Neale Hurston, or… I'm gonna make my work about that. That will be the work.
Charlotte Burns: Make that visible.
Glenn Ligon: Yeah, make that visible, but in a complicated way. And part of the project was making that visible, but we're in a different moment. Baldwin is everywhere now, you know, so we have a different relationship to those texts.
Charlotte Burns: What's that been like for you as an artist to watch? Because for you as a person it's such a profoundly meaningful text. You've spoken about as a young boy what reading meant to you. It was this world where you could travel and you could go somewhere else. And then obviously discovering Baldwin in college through your life, it's been a constant companion. And then as an artist, it's become your ground. I guess you've borne witness to Baldwin becoming a bigger part of the cultural consciousness over the past couple of decades really.
Glenn Ligon: Well, it's been amazing in some ways because it just means that there are more people thinking about him and more people working on it in scholarly ways. So, that's great.
There's a whole trove of correspondence of Baldwin's from various people that's embargoed. There's some date in the future where it'll be opened up to the public.
So, there'll be more Baldwin when those letters get opened up.
To think about Baldwin in terms of film, there's only been one film, Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk, that's the only major motion picture that's been made out of Baldwin's writing. So, there's a lot more work to do.
But I think there's a lot more work to do because Baldwin was such a rich source of knowledge and an amazing writer who keeps speaking to the moment, even though some of those essays were written 30, 40, 50 years ago.
This performance I went to last night with Meshell Ndegeocello, someone was reading Baldwin quotes throughout the concert and people were cheering wildly. These are things that have been written 50, 60 years ago, but they still spoke to the moment. So, he's amazingly prophetic in that way. But also just a beautiful writer too. So, it is a pleasure to think about him again.
Charlotte Burns: What is it about that essay, particularly that essay—I know a lot of his work is important to you—that you return to.
Glenn Ligon: Well, I suppose, initially it appealed to me because I could map my own biography onto that essay. Baldwin in the ‘50s, going to a little Swiss village in the mountains to write a novel and says, for many of the villagers, he's the only Black person they've ever met.
So, me [laughs], coming from the South Bronx to an elite private school, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with mostly white classmates, starting at that school at first grade and going through 12th grade, you know. Kids whose parents had duplexes filled with [Pablo] Picassos and [Marc] Chagalls and going off to tennis camp in the Canary Islands for the summer and all sorts of that, and me living in public housing in the South Bronx.
So, that sense of being an outsider, of being a stranger, of being a curiosity, I think when I got to Baldwin's essay, and that would've been probably in college though—maybe it's possible I read it in high school—that it was a real revelation, that somebody understood and could articulate all of the complexity around those kinds of positions.
Charlotte Burns: Do you find that as you've grown older, the texts have grown older with you? Because you were a young man when you read them. Do you find that, as your position in life has changed and your emotional space, do you find that Baldwin has grown with you, that you've seen new things in the text?
Glenn Ligon: Oh, definitely new things in the text, but also new ways to approach the text too. Right now I'm making a series of drawings that I'll be showing in an exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum at the end of the year that are literally rubbings from the surface of Baldwin paintings. So, [laughs] it's a new way to approach the text. Talk about ground. The text has become literally the ground on which, like a gravestone rubbing almost, except, they don't look like gravestone rubbings, but yeah, in a way I found a new way to approach that text, literally using it as a ground.
Charlotte Burns: I love that. That's amazing.
I wanted to talk to you about a quote from the essay that's really stuck with me, in general, but it came to have a new meaning as I was thinking of your work. He says in the essay, “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. And anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead, turns himself into a monster.”
And something I wanted to talk to you about is history in your work. What I mean is the way that you find specific details in your writing and in your art and in your curating, across your practice; you have a gift for finding the perfect detail that captures a historical moment, whether that's in your writing and your mom calling Hip-hop pioneers, “hoodlums, scratching up perfectly good records”, or your recollection of 9/11, which is finding yourself directing traffic on Flatbush Avenue pressed into service by a cop who needed a break to use the bathroom. Or, your Million Man March paintings, which is a multi-layered work, ostensibly about a historic march organized by Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, to address the visibility of Black men in the country—Black women were not encouraged to attend that march. And in the images you were looking for their absence or their disappearance, but you were also thinking, at once about this specific moment in time, but the repetition of these moments in time and you said, “Black people gather every 20 or 30 years at the heart of this nation to assert our presence here. It's doomed to fail because we keep having to do this.”
And you write about that sort of repetition, that loop of history in your essay “On Walking in Memphis” the presence of the past in the present, and an art student who says this to you, who wants to think about all this stuff, and you have these collectors telling you about how they marched in the Civil Rights Movement or even when you're watching The Wire and you talk about how victories are fleeting because the playing field is not level.
We're talking now in the summer 2025, and that Baldwin quote, like you say, feels so prophetic. And I'm sure it felt prophetic at all those times you were writing.
So the question is specific: How do you find in your writing and in your art and in your curating—I'm thinking also of the show you just did in Cambridge—that very specific detail. Is it an editing process? Is it an instinct for looking at the specific thing?
Is it a filtering process? Like how do you get to that detail in the text, that text itself in the work or the image that you want to abstract, or if you're curating even the absence of an image; in Cambridge you took away a work and showed the wallpaper behind.
How do you figure out which is the detail that's going to reveal absence or major historical moments to us and how the narrative around them is something we might want to question.
Glenn Ligon: [Laughs] Ooh, big question.
And, well, first I would say that often I don't know what the work is about until I start making it. So, I have to go through a process to figure out what I'm actually interested in. And that's true with everything: writing, curatorial projects, making artwork. It's a kind of thinking about all these different things and then chiseling away. If I'm talking about the kind of Michelangelo, what is it, the cliche about, like he chiseled the block of stone to reveal the statue within, sort of like that.
But maybe it's more mysterious than that. Maybe it's just kind of something sticks in my head out of all the research that I've done or all the essays I've read and whatever, the images I've looked at and I say, “Oh, that's interesting,” and I keep thinking about it. It's like, well, if I keep thinking about it, maybe that's, that's the thing.
So, your example, when I did the show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, I just happened to walk through the galleries about two and a half years before the show actually happened. And they were changing out a display of paintings and so this amazing gold wallpaper that was 100 years old, that was in one of the galleries, was bare. And where the paintings had been was bright gold because the paintings themselves had blocked the light, and then you would see this bright gold square on a kind of faded gold background because the sun had faded the rest of the wallpaper. And I just thought, “Oh, that's beautiful.” That's all. [Laughs] Just thought, “Oh, that's so beautiful.” And they were like, “Oh yeah, we, you know, we’re a museum, we have to change that wall.” I was like, “Why would you change that wallpaper? It's beautiful.”
But that stuck in my head because I thought it was super interesting to see the outlines of past installations in this wallpaper, but also to realize that there's some beauty in things that are normally not looked at. So nobody really thought about that gold wallpaper. But I just thought it was beautiful.
And then I realized, like, it is very cheeky to ask in the early Renaissance galleries, which that was, to ask them to leave off all these paintings. We took down like 12 paintings and just put up one painting in its place and focus on the wallpaper.
And I think it was just a way of saying to a viewer, we imagine the way that institutions hang their collections is the way it has to be, but it doesn't have to be like that. It's just conventions that we've grown used to, that's all. [Laughs] And it sometimes takes an artist to come in there and shake it up sometimes.
Charlotte Burns: I like something you said about curating that it's something you do outta necessity, but when we had our pre-chat, you also said to me that you have strategic ignorance, where you can play dumb as an artist about things that curators could not like shipping costs and what works you are and are not allowed to remove, which I thought was really great. Because essentially what you're talking about is freedom and where you found freedom in your practice.
And so could you talk a little bit more about that? How much freedom there is in curating for you and what that's brought to your practice overall?
Glenn Ligon: Well, talking about, sort of, sense of permission that younger artists feel around their work and their practice, being different than mine. My first instinct, walking into the Fitzwilliam Museum and seeing that empty bay with a beautiful wallpaper is like, “Oh, I should just make that part of my show. Empty out this whole bay, but they won't let me do that.” And I was talking to a younger artist, we did a podcast, it was Rene Matić, and they were kind of aghast because they don't think like that. They don't think about what the institution wants. They think about what they want, first.
So that was very interesting because I felt how internalized systems were for me, and so in some ways, doing a curatorial project is about unlearning things, unlearning the ways that I think about institutions or museum display, and working with these institutions to change things.
And at the Fitzwilliam, there were very subtle things. I just, I wanted the show, it was a show about rearranging displays of their permanent collection. But I decided, “Oh, I wanna write my own wall labels. The curators can write their wall labels too. We'll just put them side by side.”
But what I'm thinking about as an artist when I fill up a gallery with 500 Dutch still life paintings from the 17th, 18th centuries is different than what the curator might be thinking about when they do that. And in fact, my wall label, the title of it was “Trouble”, because I said, something like, a room full of flowers, how nice. But in these images, Dutch still lifes, we see the spoils of empire. These tulips, these butterflies, these plants are coming from colonial holdings. They are the spoils of empire.
So, as much as we admire the skill of the artists painting these beautiful flowers and plants and animals, we also have to acknowledge that these are records of conquest. Now I hadn't seen that really on the wall labels before, so that was kind of what I wanted to do in that situation.
But I've forgotten what you asked me. You asked me a big question and I've forgotten the specifics of it.
Charlotte Burns: It was about freedom and how it's changed your practice and you’re answering it beautifully, about internalizing institutional values and trying to change them. And the example you're giving is really interesting because every review I've read of the Fitzwilliam show quotes that wall label that you've written and how people would never look at a Vermeer in the same way ever again.
Glenn Ligon: I took that from the writer, Teju Cole, too, who wrote a beautiful review of Vermeer show, that was, maybe two years ago, and talks about this very issue of trouble, and so I was extrapolating in some ways from his way of looking at this works and his deep scholarship.
[Musical interlude]Charlotte Burns: I wanna ask you some questions about institutional values, but sort of detouring past a story that you wrote about getting lunch with your mom, that I really liked, where you were walking to get grilled cheese lunch with your mom who worked as a therapist aide at the Bronx Psychiatric Center. Since it was an outpatient facility, you said half the people you ran into on the walk were being treated at the hospital and you would play a game. You would guess whether someone was a patient or employee when that person shouted “Ligon” at your mom and you were never very good at that game.
Reading that, you said with such economy, so much about institutions and their values and about what society thinks is acceptable or not, and how we can tell, whether people fit in or don't fit in, and what that says about you and how you felt you fitted in or didn't fit in, as a young person.
Some of the things you listed in the 2021 essay “Advice for Young Artists” are comments that institutional leaders, directors, and curators of museums have said to you and they're truly appalling comments. And you write that some of these things you would hope would be easier to navigate as you gain more success, but are not necessarily.
Are you ever tempted to say who speaks to you in that way? Is that going in the autobiography that you mentioned in the front of the book?
Glenn Ligon: Oh, that autobiography’ll never get written. It's too much work. Writing is as hard as making artwork. I'm writing an essay for Hurvin Anderson, for his exhibition at the Tate. It's only 1,000 words, and I've been working on it for three months. So, there’s not going to be an autobiography.
Charlotte Burns: But 1,000 is harder than 10,000 words. That’s…
Glenn Ligon: Okay!
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: Economy is harder than abundance, when it comes to writing.
Glenn Ligon: Right.
Well, I, you know, it may have been in that essay, but maybe in another place where I say, before you curse out the curator that hung your work upside down at the group show, remember that they might end up running a museum someday. And that, that is true. [Laughs] That has happened where it's like, thinking the long game here. You never know who that person is gonna be and how helpful they will be to you in the future. So, before you curse them out, just think about it.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, that's a very good point.
You did, politely critique the Met[roplitan Museum of Art] and SFMOMA when they posted your work during the Black Lives Matter movement without permission, and you were interviewed about it in the Brooklyn Rail and said it was “what the kids call virtue signaling”, noting that the Met had put up an image as if there was a vast holding of your work, and they were so committed to it when they only owned a handful of prints.
Beyond just asking permission, in your experience—and your work is collected by institutions all over the world—what do you feel like genuine institutional support of artists actually looks like and feels like?
Glenn Ligon: Well, I think it's about a commitment to the work over time. Not just, “We bought one thing and we're one and done. We bought a painting of yours 20 years ago, so we're done. And we put it up every couple of years just to signal that we have something in the collection.”
So I think it's that, but also I think scholarship and resources too. At this point in my career, if a museum's doing a show, there’s got to be a catalogue. There's got to be some institutional buy-in. There's got to be some talk about an acquisition if they don't have holdings of my work. So, I don't want to be in the position that
I find a lot of times artists of color are where we have to curate our own shows at major institutions, or we're told crazy things like, “Oh, we don't have money to build drywall.” I was like, “Well, [Laughs] you have money to build a whole new wing of the museum [Laughs]. How do you not have money to build a drywall?”
But this doesn't end. This is not like ancient history. This wasn't when I was a young artist that these things get said to me. So, it's a constant struggle, I think, so…
Charlotte Burns: How do you navigate that? I mean, your essay was titled “Advice for Young Artists”, but I guess it's “Advice for Artists”?
Glenn Ligon: Yeah. It's advice for artists basically. Because it doesn't seem to…you don't ever get to the point where you get to just relax.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Glenn Ligon: Well, I think you negotiate that by making microclimates, finding the curators who respect your work and think through it with you. I think a perfect example of that is Rashid Johnson's show at the Guggenheim is lovingly curated by Naomi Beckwith. And I heard that she said in a talk, “Oh yeah, I've worked in the show for three years—plus the 16 years before that that Rashid and I have been talking about his work.” That's how you get loving care in an institution, is to have that kind of advocacy for the work and deep dialogue.
Charlotte Burns: Do you have a dream curator or institution you'd like to have a big exhibition with?
Glenn Ligon: No, I mean, there are lots of curators that I have loved working with, Thelma Golden obviously. But in terms of institutions, I realized that different institutions can do different things.
The show that I had at the Fitzwilliam, for example, was perfect because they had a comprehensive collection from Egyptian antiquities to Rembrandt’s to modernist paintings, et cetera. So, to be able to work with that kind of collection was great. And to work with it unexpectedly.
You know, Glenn's interested in Dutch still live paintings? I was like, yeah, Glenn is actually, Glenn is interested in Chinese porcelain? It was like, yeah! Glenn is interested in Chinese porcelain. So, that was a great opportunity to work with the breadth of things that I'm interested in.
But, big institutional shows allow you to make big statements, so that's a very different kind of show. If you're doing a retrospective and it's 8,000 sq. ft., it's a different show. So I like working both ways.
I like working in smaller institutions or most bespoke, more focused projects. The show at Aspen is one gallery, one floor, of the museum and is focused mostly on works on paper. And it's not a show I've ever really done before, so I'm very excited to. It’s sort of an expanded notion of works on paper, but it's a show I'm really excited to work on, because it's the first time we've done it.
Charlotte Burns: Are you a deadline driven artist? Do you work towards exhibitions? Is that the way that your practice moves through?
Glenn Ligon: Inevitably, one does work towards exhibitions, but I don't like to work like that. Sometimes you need artificial deadlines just to get things done. But I don't necessarily work the best under that kind of pressure. I tend to be slow in terms of making the work and thinking it through and changing my mind and editing. So, I need more time.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
One thing I wanted to ask you about was a recent work you installed on the High Line, the Untitled (America/Me), which takes the 2008 America neon, which seemed like, kind of ambivalent comment on that era's, optimism, the Obama era, and it crosses out several letters to just leave “me”. You made it in 2022 and I wanted to ask you what it was like to revisit your own work and what it was like to revisit that specific work?
And also you spoke about neon being a material, and the word “America” being a material, and the idea of playing with a word we all think we know what it means. So, what that word means to you right now?
Glenn Ligon: Well, I think it means to me the sort of thing it meant to me when I first started making “American” neon. It says, we have this sort of notion of what we have an agreement on what America means, but clearly we don't. Current politics has shown us that.
But also I think one of the strategies around that work in neon was to defamiliarize that word, to make it seem strange. To make it blink off and on in annoying ways, to invert it, to cover the neon with black paint. All these ways, strategies, of de-familiarizing this word that we think we know somehow.
Jasper Johns: take an object, do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it. So this is, take a word, do something to it, do something else to it. Do something else to it.
So, when I was approached by the High Line to do this billboard project, I went back to not actually the work, I actually went back to a postcard I had sent someone. There was an invitation, I guess for show that had that 2008 America neon in it, and I just took that postcard and mailed it to a friend and crossed out all the letters of America and left the “m” and “e”.
When I started thinking about that billboard I just happened to be at a dinner party at my friend's house, and I saw that little postcard I sent them that they very kindly kept and put in a frame, and I thought, “Oh, that's not bad.” [Laughs] So, I basically borrowed back my own work to make that billboard.
But it's nice. Sometimes you don't know when you're making art, I guess.
Charlotte Burns: I love that.
Glenn Ligon: That was just a little postcard. I was like, “Oh, I'm just, oh, me! Hi!”
Charlotte Burns: That's literally a gift from your past self, you know?
Glenn Ligon: [Laughs] Yes. And I like when things like that, you see things like that. I thought, “Huh, that's not bad.” But sometimes you need somebody to point it out. Like they put it in a frame.
Charlotte Burns: Literally put it in a frame.
Glenn Ligon: They put it in a frame, and I thought, “Oh, they think that's a piece of art.” Maybe it is, you know.
Charlotte Burns: And now it's an enormous installation in neon on the High Line sitting atop New York City.
Glenn Ligon: Yes.
Charlotte Burns: Definitely made it to work of art status.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: It also is reminiscent of David Hammons’ Black Light, the idea of taking something, which is that sort of space of emptiness and making it familiar and unfamiliar.I felt like we couldn't have a conversation and not talk about David Hammons, who I know has been such an influence on your work. You met him when you were an intern at the Studio Museum [in Harlem] in 1982, and you've said you always looked to David to think about how far one can go.
Can you talk about what you've learned from his approach to navigating the art world and how far one can go?
Glenn Ligon: Well, I think David's a pirate. He doesn't settle in one port, so he famously said when he started having success, making body prints—these fantastic drawings he would make by greasing up his body, putting a graphite on and pressing it onto paper, and doing that with his body and other people's bodies. And he said once he became known for those, he stopped doing them, and I thought, “Oh, check that.” [Laughs] Check. [Laughs]
You know, once you stop learning from doing something, once people give you too much applause and acclaim for doing something, stop doing it. Because that's when you get trapped. That's when you become, “Oh, he's that artist that does body prints.”
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Glenn Ligon: So there's an irony in the art world of everybody loves that thing, until they're tired of it. “Oh, he just does body prints,” you know?
So, David was always out running that. But also David is just an artist who's not interested in institutional acclaim in the way that other artists are. So David Hammons is invited to do a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So the show he does is he gets them to put up a work by his mentor, Charles White, a fantastic teacher, draftsperson. And in that room is a [Leonardo] da Vinci drawing from not any old collection, Queen Elizabeth II’s collection. [Laughs] So he gets the museum to borrow that one, and I thought, “Genius.” They thought they were getting a David Hammons’ show, and that's what they got. Brilliant.
Charlotte Burns: Brilliant.
Glenn Ligon: But to be able to just work with institutions on your own terms or work with galleries on your own terms is amazing to me.
I remember a show he had at a gallery in New York, and you walked in a very grand townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He had a lot of his tarp paintings, which I love.
Charlotte Burns: I remember that show.
Glenn Ligon: Yeah. And in the doorway between rooms, this sort of archway between rooms, was just this piece of clear plastic hanging down from the arch. And I thought, “Is that a work?” A collector friend of David said, “No, David just got annoyed at them during installations. He just put that up to mess with them.” Just this random piece of plastic.
[Laughter]
And I love that impulse, just like, it's my work. I can play with it, I can play with you, I can play, I don't take this grand townhouse so seriously. I don't feel like you're doing me a favor showing my work, I'm gonna do what I want. So, that is always a model for me.
But also just his attentiveness to environment, the street. It makes it seem like I'm big friends with David. I've talked to him maybe an hour in my entire life, over 25 years. [Laughs] One hour.
So, but he's been a deep influence. I admire the work so much, and I'm fortunate enough to live with a couple of things that I've acquired over the years, and hang on every word he says.
Charlotte Burns: I love that. It makes so much sense that you have not pursued an intimate friendship with him because so much of your work, your art, and your writing shows such restraint and careful moderation and modulation between intimacy and distance.
Glenn Ligon: I dunno. I just, I'm just scared of him, that's all. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: What do you think would happen?
Glenn Ligon: Well, I have met him and he's been perfectly nice. I mean, I was in a restaurant in upstate New York and I was on the way to the bathroom and I hear this “Glenn”, and it's David Hammons sitting in a booth with a friend and I go over to say hello.
And I guess I was gone from the table that I was sitting at so long they thought I had fainted or they came to look for me. And they're like, “Oh, he's talking to David Hammons. Oh, you must know David really well.” It's like, no. That half an hour was the most I've ever talked to David. And even though I had to pee really badly, I was waiting till he was done. The minute he was done, I was going to go pee. But before that I was not moving. Because that's the most I have ever talked to this man.
Charlotte Burns: Oh my gosh.
Glenn Ligon: And it was lovely. It was amazing.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: That's meeting a hero. [Laughs]
Glenn Ligon: Sometimes they disappoint. David never disappoints.
Charlotte Burns: That's so good to know. That's so good to know that there are wonderful things in this world.
You also talk about the space that he creates of imagination. You have this beautiful passage in your 2004 essay on him, which also is the essay that launched your career as “an artist who writes”, as you put it, and you say, “it's hard to leave your body behind, especially when your body is always being thrown up in your face, but being heavy is a motherfucker. The question is how to remove weight, to move towards lightness as Hammons has done. How to do this while still acknowledging the particular history of a body that has been used, as Stuart Hall suggests, as if it were, and often was the only cultural capital we had.” And then you have this wonderful end in the final paragraph as you're closing, you say, “If Blackness is a construct, then we are all construction workers. And what Hammons has done is to provide the space in which Blackness can be constructed in light.”
You revisit things often in your work. You come back to his work Concerto in Black and Blue and you say it later, it's a response to the post 9/11 melancholy, but also a meditation on Black space, and you connect it to projects like Rick Lowe's Project Row Houses and Theaster Gates’s work as examples of speculative geography that reimagine Blackness as chains of association, or acts of imagination.
I wanted to ask you now how you see that work, because I know you revisit it, and how you see your work now and others, in creating or imagining that space.
Glenn Ligon: Well, I think there's a lot of talk amongst my peers or artists about Black space and what that might mean. What that might look like. And I think Concerto in Black and Blue, which was from 2002, right after 9/11, was in New York City. Imagine walking into a sort of cavernous, I don't know, 20, 30,000 square feet of dark space, in the wake of 9/11. That was terrifying, in some ways. We mistrusted each other.
And so to walk into David's installation, which was just dark, empty rooms. You're given this little blue flashlight to walk around with. You saw other flashlights off in the distance of other people walking around. There was nothing there.
And so this idea of this Blackness, Concerto in Black and Blue, which is a great title because the blue being you walking around with your flashlights, but also, what did I do to be so black and blue, from the Louis Armstrong song. All these associations with those two colors. As a friend once said, David can make a masterpiece with two words, black and blue. And he did.
So, I think, for me, that was a super important piece because it, without naming something specifically, was full of so many possibilities. And so, if Black space is anything, it is that, the space of possibilities, without a kind of specific naming.
And I think other artists deal with this too. I think Arthur Jafa's work, I think, deals with, Torkwase Dyson. I think there are a lot of artists who are thinking through the politics, poetics of this notion of Black space.
And so Hammons has been super important, but also I just, you know, Hammons said, “The less I do, the more of an artist I am.” And so, that's a sort of instruction manual for future artists too. Do less. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. I love that.
Talking of doing less, you said there probably won't be a follow up to the book Distinguishing Piss from Rain, which is the collected and collated writings and interviews. Although you, and we briefly touched on this, you have been telling people you're gonna write an autobiography. What it's about, you're not sure, although you said it's a perverse spin on Toni Morrison's statement, that if there's a book you really wanna read but hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
So, what if you wrote an autobiography? What is it you want to read?
Glenn Ligon: [Laughs] Well, I think, yeah, it's hard to know like what its focus would be, because a lot of my writing work is autobiographical. The autobiographical is the touchstone, and it's a way for me to get into whatever work I'm writing about. So, that's always been a strain where I sort of start with an autobiographical kind of story and use that as a way to talk about a relationship to a particular artwork or whatever.
So I guess it would be an exploration of how I became an artist, growing up in the Bronx, despite my mom's comment about rappers, being hoodlums, scratching up perfectly good records in the parking lot. What influence, talk about use of words and transforming words. What is rap, but that, the transformation of words, the emphasis on current events and history.
But also graffiti, which I don't think was an influence at the time. I saw it every day on the way to school, on the subways. I grew up in the Bronx in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Nothing but graffiti on the trains then, but it didn't occur to me that my work would be so much involved with text. But in a way, graffiti set the model for that, text as art.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
It was amazing to read that when you wrote about [Thomas] Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument and how if you'd have been a kid and that had been there, would that have changed your life any more than riding the subway and, seeing the graffiti and then later seeing [Jean-Michel] Basquiat and that kind of link or that permission that you felt when you saw Basquiat’s work to use text and what it is about art and life. Which brings you back again, I guess to what you were talking about with the younger generation.
Glenn Ligon: Yeah.
Well, also just thinking about growing up and we are going to continue with the autobiographical strain, Gordon Matta-Clark was cutting out floors and walls in tenements in housing around where I lived, but I didn't know that. I didn't know who Gordon Matta-Clark was, didn't encounter that work. I see it now, Bronx Floors, so it is amazing to think that was going on at the same time, but more immediately was the birth of Hip-hop and graffiti, those were the influences.
But I also, as I said, I was going to this private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with kids who had Picassos in their houses. So, that was an influence too. I was seeing that work. And I also went to the Metropolitan Museum, after school drawing classes at the Metropolitan. So, I have notebooks from when I was a teenager of drawings of [Henri] Matisse paintings, French landscapes, hundreds of drawings from paintings at the Met, and maybe that was more about I wanted to go to France [Laughs] and I was from working class family. We didn't have money to travel like that, but I traveled by looking at the paintings, drawing the paintings. That was a way of traveling.
Still love Matisse. Still love [Paul] Cézanne. Still love [Claude] Monet.
Charlotte Burns: And what's amazing, if you go to those places, is that you see, they were just drawing what they saw.
I remember the first time I ever traveled to the south of France, they have those kind of little billboards.
Glenn Ligon: Right.
Charlotte Burns: And they have like, “This is a pointillist painting.This is where they sat.” You're like, “Oh my God. It actually just looks like that.” Like, I thought it was, I thought it was a leap of the imagination, but you're like, “Oh, they just drew what they saw.” Like it actually is. It just looked very different than my local landscape.
Glenn Ligon: Maybe it's come to look like that. What's the Gertrude Stein, I don't know if this has happened or actually happened or not, but when Picasso paints her portrait and she says, but it doesn't look like me, and he says, “It will.” So, maybe we've just…
Charlotte Burns: It's true.
Glenn Ligon: …looked at the paintings enough that the landscape looks like the paintings rather than the paintings look like the landscapes.
Charlotte Burns: It’s true. I think you’re right.
I want to ask you a little bit about the future. I'm thinking here of your essay, “Remember the Revolution” and again, this is touching on your autobiography. You write about your Uncle Donald's and then your own pair of white vinyl boots and you link them to the 1974 Sun Ra film, Space Is the Place.
And you say—this is in 2010 when you were writing this—that, “No one believes in the future anymore, but we still believe in representations and representatives of it.” And you elaborate, “perhaps what we believe in most about the future are those like Sun Ra who truly believe in it”. And the final words of that essay are, “I remember the future.”
Do you think that the future belongs back in 1974? Like, thinking of the future now in 2025, do you have faith in the future now? If you were writing your autobiography, is it still linked to that kind of promise of those white vinyl boots?
Glenn Ligon: I don't think it's linked specifically to that, but I think in general, Afrofuturism was about this—I mean, what became termed Afrofuturism that, not that Sun Ra called what he was doing Afrofuturism—but I think some notion that our fate as Black people is not tied to what we see around us. You know, better to be from Saturn and the future than to be from America at that particular moment. And I would argue that's probably true now too.
Also, it's very hard to articulate what we want. It's easy to say what we don't want.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Glenn Ligon: It's very hard to articulate what we want. So, I think that's partially the project of artists, is to start to articulate, speculate about what we might want the future to look like. Because we know what we don't want, but what do we want? What is our vision for it? And that's harder, harder to know, harder to know.
So, I think that's one of the jobs that artists give themselves is to imagine, try to imagine the future. Try to imagine what we want. Think about what we want the future to be.
I think.
Charlotte Burns: I mean, I certainly think your work does that. You create a space for new thinking. Every time I read an essay of yours, I have to reread it about seven times because I think I understand it and then I'm like, “Wait, no, there's another thing there.” And over time I read it differently because the layering and the legibility of it shifts so much. Same with your art.But for you, what if you were defining that future that you wanted, what does that look like?
Glenn Ligon: Oh, I dunno. [Laughs] I dunno. I think I have to start making the art to figure that out. I'm, I figure things out by making the work. So, it's hard to define the future. I just have to work…
Charlotte Burns: In the present.
Glenn Ligon: …on it. Work in the present to start thinking about the future.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: So let me ask you some ‘what ifs’ as we round out.What if your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them most?
Glenn Ligon: I think my younger self would be surprised that I still live with doubts, but my older self would say, that's how you keep going. That's how you keep fresh, feel like you haven't accomplished something, so you keep going to accomplish that thing.
Charlotte Burns: What if you had unlimited time and resources to create, what would you do?
Glenn Ligon: Ooh. Maybe I'd write that autobiography.
Charlotte Burns: [Laughs] And what if you could go back and give your younger self just one piece of advice when you were starting out, what would it be?
Glenn Ligon: I think follow the instincts, even if they seem nonsensical because that is your work—your instincts, and the trajectories that you wanna follow. It's a lesson I learned from my painting teacher in college. She was talking to a colleague of hers, and this conversation was overheard by a friend of mine and she said, “Oh, I have this student in my class, his name is Glenn. He's making a still life. He painted the shelf, then he painted the bowl, then he painted the fruit in the bowl. I've never had someone paint a work like that before.”
And it's the first time I realized that the way I did something, which was different than how anyone else did, was actually valuable. That is the first, literally the first time I realized like, “Oh, I have a way of doing things and I shouldn't try to do things the way other people do them. I should hang on to this way I have of seeing because that is my work, that's my sensibility, that's what will take me forward.” So.
Charlotte Burns: So, be more you, but do less as an artist.
[Laughter]
Glenn Ligon: Exactly. Exactly.
Well, it took a, took Hammons a long time to do that, to be less of an artist.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Glenn Ligon: I think Concerto in Black and Blue was his masterpiece because it was doing so much with so little.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, sort of like you have to get to the top of the mountain and then go back down the other side.
Glenn Ligon: Yes.
Charlotte Burns: So what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and what's the one that motivates you to get up in the morning?
Glenn Ligon: Uh, keeps me up at night is the clock is ticking. [Laughs] So, there's so much time I have and so many things I think I wanna do. And that's what gets me up in the morning is there's so many things I wanna do, and it's not always about art. There's other things I wanna do too. I want to go to Japan for a year. I better get going with that.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: Oh, amazing. When are you gonna do that?
Glenn Ligon: Well, I have a godson that lives in Kyoto, so he's old enough to, and he's bilingual, so he can be my studio assistant and translator. So, we've, we're already setting up.
Charlotte Burns: Oh, this is so great. You've got it figured out.
Glenn Ligon: Yes. And I love, I mean, my Japanese is atrocious, but I love the culture. It's amazing.
Charlotte Burns: Oh, wow. Maybe we should do an in-person recording in Japan next time.
Glenn Ligon: Yes.
Charlotte Burns: [Laughs] Go and see you.
Glenn Ligon: Go that. Live from Kyoto.
Charlotte Burns: Oh, I'd love that.
Okay. We've recorded a podcast with Kemi Ilesanmi on the season as well. We talk about the seeds that we plant.
Glenn Ligon: Hmm.
Charlotte Burns: So, if you are planting seeds right now, if this is a planting period, what seeds are you planting? What are you growing?
Glenn Ligon: Hmm. Well, I guess the seeds I'm planting is, in one way is, putting out a book of collected essays and putting in that book advice for young artists. It's the advice that I wish I had at as a young artist, and I feel like, okay, let's give that to them now. So, have it all in one place, rather than piecemeal.
Charlotte Burns: There's one thing you say in the advice. You say, “Dealers are not your friends. Your friends don't take 50% of your money.”
[Laughter]
Glenn Ligon: I got in trouble for that. [Laughs]
Well, that's one piece of advice. Artists should be getting more than 50%, so we’ll add that on.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. Yeah. What if there was one piece of advice you could take, would it be that one, would there be another piece of advice? What stands out to you?
Glenn Ligon: Yeah, get more than 50%. [Laughs] Took me a long time to get to that advice, but that's.
Oh, that's one thing I would say. Artists don't talk to each other enough about the business side of being an artist. We don't know each other's deals.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, more transparency.
Glenn Ligon: Yeah. More transparency between artists.
Charlotte Burns: I think that sounds great.
Glenn, thank you so much for everything today. This has been so, so wonderful. I could keep you for hours, but I know that's unfair. Like you said, the clock is ticking.
Thank you very much, Glenn. It's been really great.
Glenn Ligon: Thank you for the discussion. It's been really fun.
[Musical interlude]Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Glenn Ligon.
And if you haven’t read his book Distinguishing Piss from Rain: Writings and Interviews, I highly recommend that you do.
Join us next time. We’ll be talking to Nana Oforiatta-Ayim about bridging ancient wisdom and contemporary practice. About rematriation, institution building, and knowledge-sharing. And a 54-volume encyclopedia of African culture and a brand new trilogy, an updated take on the classic book by John Berger, Ways of Seeing.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: The most surprising thing that I learnt was not as much has been lost as I assumed it had. I assumed that the colonial encounter had been very successfully destructive, and the more that I traveled around the country, the more I spoke with everyday people and encountered this knowledge embodied within people, the grief turned into joy and excitement of, “Wow! There’s so much here. How do people not know about this?” It’s so alive but it’s so untapped that it just wasn’t being translated into what we call the art world.
Charlotte Burns: It’s a fantastic jam-packed episode. I can’t wait for you guys to hear it.
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&, and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns, with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @Schwartzman.art.