Glenn Ligon: Layers of Meaning | "Exclusive" | Art21

(Music Playing)

There's lots of levels on which my

paintings can be approached.

One can approach it as simply an object

that has a certain kind of beauty.

One can approach it as

an object that has a text in it that has different

levels of legibility.

(Silence)

If one knows James Baldwin and realizes

that the text in my painting is from an

essay that he's written, then that opens up

the painting; gives it a different level of

meaning.

(Silence)

The paintings that address the Million Man

March were made in the mid '90's,

a couple of years after Louis Farrakahn,

the leader of the Nation of Islam

organized a march on the mall in

Washington, D.C. about the visibility and

presence of black men in the country,

which I find rather ironic, since

black people have been in this country since the beginning

before there was even a country

but we still feel the need to

assert our personhood.

(Silence)

The irony of this march, perhaps, was that

black women were encouraged to absent

themselves from work, but not to attend

the march as full participants.

When I started to think about making silk-screen

paintings using images of the march,

this kind of notion of absence or

disappearance of women was something I

was interested in and something I tried

to find in the images themselves.

(Silence)

Like any artwork, things become richer

if you know more about them,

but I don't think that's crucial.

Someone can walk into a museum and not

know a single thing about a Jackson Pollock

painting and still have a reaction to it;

still get something from it. The thing

that they get from it may be richer if they

know more about it, but that's like

anything (laughter), you know, that's

about being in the world.

(Silence)

(Music Playing)