Written contributions by the artist Glenn Ligon are central to this publication, says Alex Farquharson.
Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions is an exhibition of work by 45 artists curated by one of the leading American artists of his generation. It could be seen as Ligon’s attempt at realising his ideal museum as a temporary exhibition.
The exhibition is being shown at Nottingham Contemporary (until 14 June) and then Tate Liverpool (30 June–18 October), and is a collaboration between our institutions. We have a shared interest in how artists approach curating exhibitions and how they think about art institutions.
Since the late 1980s Ligon’s work has been based on a subtle and complex practice of citation. His work makes direct and indirect allusions to literature, postwar art, popular culture and American history. He also writes frequently on other artists and cultural figures.
His writings were recently anthologised in Yourself in the World, published to coincide with his mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. So it made particular sense to invite him to curate an exhibition.
Ligon’s work is always about how the self encounters others (and the world in general), including how his own practice relates to that of others.
From the outset it was important to us that Ligon’s work – paintings and otherwise – was included in the exhibition. Encounters and Collisions unfolds his own practice into the work of artists he has written about, alluded to, been influenced by, or with whom he feels affinity.
The postwar American canon is particularly well represented (from abstract expressionism of the late 1940s, to conceptual and performance work of the early 1970s), as are black artists of various generations.
Complex structure
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, published by Tate and Nottingham Contemporary, documents the exhibition in full, and features new essays by the artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz, and Francesco Manacorda, the artistic director of Tate Liverpool, and I. Joseph Logan, its designer, has elegantly conveyed the publication’s rich contents and complex structure.
But the publication is also more than a catalogue. Given the importance of literature to Ligon’s work, and as an extension of his role as curator, we invited him to create an anthology of texts for the publication. The 15 authors he has anthologised include Marcel Proust, James Baldwin, Adrienne Kennedy, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and Stuart Hall.
Rather than framing the exhibition, the anthology should really be read in parallel to it, as is suggested by the structure of the book. The main part is divided into several subsections, each beginning with a text by Ligon, followed by a sequence of images, then either two or three of the anthologised texts.
Ligon’s written contribution takes the form of letters to six of the artists in the exhibition, as well as one to Kennedy, whose autobiography of her influences, People Who Led to My Plays, informed how he first approached our invitation to curate this exhibition.
Ligon’s honest, witty, concise and profound letters underscore the sense of intimacy and relationality that informs the project in general.
By threading his own work through the art, writing and experience of others, Ligon offers visitors to the exhibition, and readers of this publication, an unusually personal encounter with icons of art history and pivotal events in the wider culture.
Alex Farquharson is the director of Nottingham Contemporary
Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions is an exhibition of work by 45 artists curated by one of the leading American artists of his generation. It could be seen as Ligon’s attempt at realising his ideal museum as a temporary exhibition.
The exhibition is being shown at Nottingham Contemporary (until 14 June) and then Tate Liverpool (30 June–18 October), and is a collaboration between our institutions. We have a shared interest in how artists approach curating exhibitions and how they think about art institutions.
Since the late 1980s Ligon’s work has been based on a subtle and complex practice of citation. His work makes direct and indirect allusions to literature, postwar art, popular culture and American history. He also writes frequently on other artists and cultural figures.
His writings were recently anthologised in Yourself in the World, published to coincide with his mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. So it made particular sense to invite him to curate an exhibition.
Ligon’s work is always about how the self encounters others (and the world in general), including how his own practice relates to that of others.
From the outset it was important to us that Ligon’s work – paintings and otherwise – was included in the exhibition. Encounters and Collisions unfolds his own practice into the work of artists he has written about, alluded to, been influenced by, or with whom he feels affinity.
The postwar American canon is particularly well represented (from abstract expressionism of the late 1940s, to conceptual and performance work of the early 1970s), as are black artists of various generations.
Complex structure
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, published by Tate and Nottingham Contemporary, documents the exhibition in full, and features new essays by the artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz, and Francesco Manacorda, the artistic director of Tate Liverpool, and I. Joseph Logan, its designer, has elegantly conveyed the publication’s rich contents and complex structure.
But the publication is also more than a catalogue. Given the importance of literature to Ligon’s work, and as an extension of his role as curator, we invited him to create an anthology of texts for the publication. The 15 authors he has anthologised include Marcel Proust, James Baldwin, Adrienne Kennedy, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and Stuart Hall.
Rather than framing the exhibition, the anthology should really be read in parallel to it, as is suggested by the structure of the book. The main part is divided into several subsections, each beginning with a text by Ligon, followed by a sequence of images, then either two or three of the anthologised texts.
Ligon’s written contribution takes the form of letters to six of the artists in the exhibition, as well as one to Kennedy, whose autobiography of her influences, People Who Led to My Plays, informed how he first approached our invitation to curate this exhibition.
Ligon’s honest, witty, concise and profound letters underscore the sense of intimacy and relationality that informs the project in general.
By threading his own work through the art, writing and experience of others, Ligon offers visitors to the exhibition, and readers of this publication, an unusually personal encounter with icons of art history and pivotal events in the wider culture.
Alex Farquharson is the director of Nottingham Contemporary
