GLENN LIGON
Late at night, early in the morning, at noon
15 January – 11 April 2026
New York, 18th Street
‘late at night, early in the morning, at noon’ is a two-part exhibition of new and historic works on paper by Glenn Ligon. This presentation extends the artist’s longstanding engagement with language and abstraction through a series of richly layered compositions that meditate on the color blue and its emotional, historical and cultural inflections. In dialogue with the writings of James Baldwin, Ligon’s latest work here traverses the space between legibility and sensation, where text dissolves into atmosphere and meaning into light.
The exhibition’s title is taken from Baldwin’s 1964 introduction to a Beauford Delaney exhibition in Paris and recalls the writer’s reflection on a window through which ‘everything one saw… was filtered through leaves.’ Ligon draws upon Baldwin’s description of light ‘as blue as the blues when the last light of sun departed,’ to consider how color and language can merge to create a kind of figuration. In these new works, blue operates as more than a color; it conveys mood, time and emotion. It evokes the twilight hour between visibility and darkness; it conjures the emotional register of Blues music. For Ligon, as for Baldwin, light becomes a metaphor for perception itself, a means of reckoning with history, intimacy and the power of art to reveal quieter truths.
In the front gallery at 18th Street, Ligon presents ‘Blue (for JB),’ a new series of large-scale works on paper that build on ideas first explored in his Stranger paintings, text-based works drawn from Baldwin’s 1953 essay ‘Stranger in the Village.’ For this new body of work, Ligon begins with rubbings made on thin sheets of Japanese Kozo paper placed atop studies he made for his Stranger paintings. This process leaves behind traces of word fragments and shapes that record the convergence of image and text. Ligon then enlarges these rubbings as silkscreens on blue grounds and applies water to the surfaces, allowing the ink to flow and blur across the paper. The resulting works oscillate between legibility and abstraction, transforming Baldwin’s words into something atmospheric and enveloping.
Punchline
2024
Untitled (Cancellation Prints)
1992 and 2003
Untitled
2016
Installation views
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Hauser & Wirth Publishers
Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews
This long-awaited and essential publication collects three decades of writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose work has been delivering an incisive examination of race, history, sexuality, and culture in America since his emergence as an artist in the late 1980s.
Edge of Reason Podcast
Multiplicity: Glenn Ligon with Solange Knowles
In this episode, conceptual artist Glenn Ligon and multidisciplinary creator Solange Knowles discuss what it means to live and create with multiplicity. Ligon reflects on his evolution from abstract expressionism to pioneering text-based works that challenge perceptions of race, language, and history.
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About the Artist
Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the influential writings and speech of 20th-century cultural figures including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. He received his BA from Wesleyan University (1982) and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1985). In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important recent solo exhibitions include Break It Down, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2025); All Over The Place, The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, England (2024); and Post-Noir, Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022). Select curatorial projects include Grief and Grievance, New Museum, New York (2021); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2017); and Encounters and Collisions, Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool (2015). His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2019), Documenta XI (2002), and Gwangju Biennale (2000).
Ligon’s work is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His awards and honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. Ligon is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Current Exhibitions
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