Public Programs @ the Whitney

Glenn Ligon: AMERICA

Public Programs

On The Death of Tom

Wednesday, March 23 8 pm

Glenn Ligon’s latest video work, The Death of Tom (2008), offers an abstractionist recreation of the final scene in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent movie Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Ligon asked experimental jazz musician, pianist, and composer Jason Moran to create a soundtrack for this piece, playing to changes in light on the screen. Join us tonight as Moran re-scores Ligon's film in a live and improvised setting. The film and performance will be followed by a conversation between Ligon and Moran, moderated by Terrance McKnight.

Reflections on the Midcareer Retrospective

Thursday, April 21 7 pm

What does a midcareer retrospective mean for an artist, and how is a career defined? This roundtable takes up these questions on the occasion of Glenn Ligon’s midcareer exhibition. The Whitney has long supported living artists at key moments in their careers, and the Museum is unique in the number of midcareer exhibitions it features. Moreover, the Whitney has featured Ligon’s work in numerous exhibitions since the early 1990s, and has amassed the largest institutional holdings of his art. Tonight, Ligon is joined by exhibition curator Scott Rothkopf and art historian Huey Copeland for a dialogue on the joys, fears, and implications of a midcareer show.

Culture Is Burning
Thursday, April 28 7 pm

Inspired by the moment in which Glenn Ligon rose to prominence, this panel contextualizes the art of the late 1980s and early 90s in the U.S. This era marked a shift in social and cultural life from a money-driven, individualistic ethos of the Reagan and Bush years, to a foregrounding of collective identities of communities that had been pushed to the margins, a period commonly cited as the rise of identity politics. Correspondingly, the visual arts field found itself in the midst of the “culture wars,” and work that had been, in many ways, an extension of free-market excess and conservative values shifted, as artists explored a visual vocabulary of progressive possibility. This panel will examine the multifaceted political, social, economic, and cultural forces that provided the conditions of possibility for a generation of artists who take up questions of power, representation, gender, race, and sexuality, to gain prominence and define a new mode of artistic practice. Panelists include art historian Douglas Crimp, artist and writer Catherine Lord, political historian and theorist Linda Nicholson, and cultural historian Tricia Rose.

Images, from top to bottom:

Glenn Ligon (b.1960), Mirror, 2002. Coal dust, printing ink, glue, gesso, and graphite on canvas, 82 5/8 × 55 1/8 in. (209.9 × 147.6 cm). Collection of Mellody Hobson © Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960), Rückenfigur, 2009. Neon and paint, 24 × 145 in. (61 × 368.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Paint and Sculpture Committee T.2010.71

Glenn Ligon (b.1960), Hands, 1996. Silkscreen ink and gesso on unstretched canvas,
82 × 144 in. (208.3 × 365.8 cm). Collection of Eileen Harris Norton © Glenn Ligon