Odd one out like James Baldwin: black artist Glenn Ligon on writer’s essay about alienation that inspires him, and his first Greater China solo show
- A Baldwin essay about alienation inspires Glenn Ligon’s conceptual art that examines how black culture is often more easily accepted globally than black people
- The post-truth world of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ inspires other works in his Hauser & Wirth show in which he partially or completely obscures texts
For his first solo exhibition in Greater China, artist Glenn Ligon will be showing works from three different series that all have something to do with an essay the American writer James Baldwin wrote, called Stranger in the Village.
Published in 1953, seven years before Ligon was born, it describes the late writer’s experience as the only black person in a small and secluded Swiss town.
Ligon grew up in the working-class South Bronx in New York but attended, in his words, a “very elite, mostly white” private school in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, thanks to scholarships.
The experience of being the odd one out at school might have drawn him to Baldwin’s essay, he says. Although New York was and is full of black people, Ligon says he still found what Baldwin wrote about alienation and blackness mirroring his own feelings.
Later, he tried to incorporate ideas from what he read into his work, but found it difficult to do so visually.