How contemporary artist Glenn Ligon's expansive body of work mines American history and literature to ask critical questions about modern culture.
OCTOBER Files- Glenn Ligon presents the first compilation of critical discourse on the multimedia work of one of the most influential American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Often citing or annotating past literary (e.g., James Baldwin), artistic (e.g., Andy Warhol), and musical (e.g., Steve Reich) interventions, Ligon's practice imaginatively explores the contradictions of speech, vision, authorship, identity, blackness, and belonging in works that are at once historically resonant and materially sensuous.
Spanning Ligon's emergence in the postmodern multicultural milieu of New York in the late 1980s and early '90s, his starring turns at Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and other international exhibitions of the 2000-2010s, and his formative impact on both new and canonical art histories, this volume provides a comprehensive accounting of the questions central to his work in painting, sculpture, video, installation, and print. With texts by writers from Wayne Koestenbaum to Rizvana Bradley, this File not only plumbs the depths of Ligon's oeuvre but also models the various approaches to critical writing that have defined art and culture of the past 30 years.
By:
Huey Copeland
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 210mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262052627
ISBN 10: 0262052628
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 26 May 2026
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Series Preface Acknowledgments Contributors Richard Meyer Borrowed Voices: Glenn Ligon and the Force of Language Wayne Koestenbaum Color Me Glenn Darby English Glenn Ligon: Committed to Difficulty Mignon Nixon On the Couch Huey Copeland Glenn Ligon and other Runaway Subjects Hilton Als Strangers in the Village Lauren DeLand Black Skin, Black Masks: The Citational Self in the Work of Glenn Ligon Krista Thompson ‘Negro Sunshine’: Figuring Blackness in the Neon Art of Glenn Ligon Janet Kraynak How to Hear What Is Not Heard: Glenn Ligon, Steve Reich, and the Audible Past Helen Molesworth What’s Black and White and Red All Over? Hamed Yousefi The Race of Appropriation: Blackness, Authorship, and Ligon on Mapplethorpe Rizvana Bradley The Death-Work of Cinema (excerpt from “The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains”) Thomas Lax Our Glenn Index of Names
Huey Copeland is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh. An editor of OCTOBER, his books include Bound to Appear- Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (edited with Steven Nelson), and Touched by the Mother- Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons. A recipient of the 2019 David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art, Copeland currently serves on the board of directors of the Terra Foundation for American Art.
