The exhibition centers on a striking group of ceramic sculptures. These moon jars debuted in an exhibition titled ‘In A Year with a Black Moon’ at Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo in 2019. Inspired by Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) white porcelain moon jars (daeho), Ligon subverts material expectations by rendering his vessels in shades of deep charcoal black. Developed through an intense three-year collaboration with a Japan-based Korean ceramicist, the process involved experimenting with unique clays and firing temperatures to transform the medium. The resulting black moon jars feature a naturally uneven, spontaneous silhouette, honoring the traditional Joseon aesthetic of naturalism and asymmetry over rigid perfection. By exploring these dark tones and rich textures, Ligon expands the boundaries of traditional ceramics to create vessels that exist simultaneously as objects of formal beauty and powerful carriers of cultural critique.

Shown alongside the ceramics are large-scale paintings from Ligon’s Static and Redacted series, which translate his longstanding focus on language into new forms of visual abstraction.

The Static series evolved out of Ligon’s iconic Stranger paintings, sharing their foundation in James Baldwin’s 1953 essay ‘Stranger in the Village.’ Through varying degrees of legibility on the commanding surfaces, Ligon evokes the conditions of hypervisibility and invisibility inherent to the Black experience, exploring the inability of language to fully articulate issues surrounding race, citizenship and subjecthood. To create the Static paintings, the artist stencils Baldwin’s prose onto a gesso foundation with white oil stick, later covering the letters with black pigment. Heavily layered and overlapped, the stenciled lettering becomes systematically unreadable. The resulting canvases visually mirror the chaotic white noise of a disrupted broadcast signal, questioning whether language in our ‘post-truth’ world can still function to describe our current cultural moment. As Ligon remarks, ‘The essay (Stranger in the Village) is not only about race relations, but it is also about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.’

This deliberate tension between text and texture carries into the new painting from his Redacted series. Here, Ligon recontextualizes the texts by crossing out every letter with a recurring ‘X’ pattern. While this dense repetition dissolves the text into a rhythmic, non-linear composition, the ‘X’ motif itself introduces layers of meaning, simultaneously invoking institutional censorship, historical erasure and potent symbols of political identity.

About the artist

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 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 ‘Break It Down,’ Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2025); ‘All Over the Place,’ The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, England (2024), ‘Post-Noir,’ Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); ‘Glenn Ligon: Call and Response,’ Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); and ‘Glenn Ligon – Some Changes,’ The Power Plant Center for Contemporary Art, Toronto (traveled internationally) (2005). Select curatorial projects include ‘Grief and Grievance,’ New Museum, New York (2021); ‘Blue Black,’ Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2017); and ‘Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions,’ Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool (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).

Upcoming exhibition of the artist

‘Glenn Ligon. Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against The Door’

30 September 2026 – 17 January 2027

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles