Synopses & Reviews
After completing the installation of his 1996 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Jasper Johns retreated to his studio in Connecticut to wipe the slate clean, beginning a body of work that was a dramatic departure from anything he had made before. The first painting in this new series included a string hanging from upper right to lower left, generating a curve called a "catenary," and this curve became the compositional backbone of the entire series. Johns produced a total of 61 paintings, drawings, and prints based on the catenary theme. The work is saturated with autobiographical references, both transparent and opaque, while it simultaneously encourages multiple layers of meaning. Sensual surfaces, fragile constructions, and formal rigor meet allusions to key moments in the history of modern art and motifs from Johns's earlier work. The poetry of Johns's catenary series is explored in an illustrated essay by the young scholar Scott Rothkopf in a catalogue published alongside the exhibition by steidl/mm. The publication reproduces all the works in the entire series.
Synopsis
American artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is best known for his landmark body of text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which appropriate the writings of African-American authors such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston. In subsequent bodies of work, Ligon has dealt with a wide range of material, including images and slogans related to early civil rights demonstrations and the Million Man March, as well as runaway slave notices, Richard Pryor jokes, and 1970s coloring books targeted at African-American children.
Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, created in close collaboration with the artist, is the first in-depth presentation of his art, including paintings, photography, sculptural installations, prints, and drawings. Essays by high-profile contributors explore Ligon's working methods and related topics such as literature and democracy, slave narratives, music, comedy, race, and sexuality, all of which situate the artist within a broader cultural context and greatly advance the understanding and renown of this pioneering American artist.
About the Author
Scott Rothkopf is curator and Adam D. Weinberg is Alice Pratt Brown Director, both at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hilton Als is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Okwui Enwezor was dean of the San Francisco Art Institute. Thelma Golden is director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University. Bennett Simpson is associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Franklin Sirmans is curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.