On the occasion of the openings of ‘Glenn Ligon. Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against The Door’ and ‘Jack Whitten. The Numinous,’ please join us in the Garden on Wednesday 30 September at 6 pm for a conversation with artist Glenn Ligon, Mirsini Amidon, daughter of Jack Whitten, and writer and professor Dr. Kellie Jones. 
 
Together, they will discuss the new exhibitions and explore the artists’ approaches to history, abstraction, Black identity, authorship and spirituality. 

Ligon’s Coloring Book paintings reveal a rarely seen facet of his practice. Conceived during a 1999 – 2000 residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the series began with children coloring pages from Afrocentric coloring books of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ligon translated their uninhibited markings into large-scale paintings, creating works that unfold into rich meditations on history, authorship and the shifting nature of meaning. 

Following a studio fire in 1980, Whitten returned to artmaking with renewed urgency, his technical ambition inseparable from a commitment to painting as spiritual transmission. The Numinous charts this pivotal period through the Soulspace paintings and circular acrylic reliefs, pixel-like grids, and Site paintings cast from urban textures including manhole covers and tire treads, alongside frottage works on paper. 
 
Following the talk, explore the exhibitions and enjoy the opening reception in the Courtyard with music by DJ As Is and a cash bar by Manuela. 
 
The program is free to attend; however reservations are recommended. Click here to register. 

About Glenn Ligon 
Glenn Ligon 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 earned 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, ‘Glenn Ligon: AMERICA,’ organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important solo exhibitions include ‘Post-Noir,’ Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); ‘Glenn Ligon: Call and Response,’ Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2014); and ‘Glenn Ligon – Some Changes,’ The Power Plant Center for Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada and then traveled internationally (2005). Select curatorial projects include ‘Grief and Grievance,’ New Museum, New York NY (2021); ‘Blue Black,’ Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis MO (2017); and ‘Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions,’ Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool, UK (2015). Ligon’s work has been shown in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2019, 2011) and Documenta XI (2002).  
 
About Mirsini Amidon 
Mirsini Amidon is the President of the Jack Whitten Foundation, and daughter of the artist. She served as her father’s studio manager in the years leading up to his death in 2018 and lives in New York City. 
 
About Dr. Kellie Jones 
Dr. Kellie Jones is Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History & Archaeology and a Professor in the Department African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.   
 
A member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Jones was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2016. Her writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals.  She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017). Her recent edited volumes include October Files: David Hammons (The MIT Press 2025) and, with Tumelo Mosaka, Black Curators Matter: Conversations on Art and Change (Getty Publications 2026).