This Artist Turns Text Into Art | Glenn Ligon Studio Visit
Video from ArtDrunk
This Artist Turns Text Into Art | Glenn Ligon Studio Visit
"Glenn Ligon makes art from text. He takes lines from writers like James Baldwin and Gertrude Stein and repeats them in oil stick, coal dust and neon until they blur into near abstraction. That difficulty is the point. The struggle to read his paintings mirrors the struggle to communicate at all.
In our seventh episode of How We Art, we visited Glenn Ligon's Brooklyn studio, digging through his archive of flat files, buckets of coal dust and well-worn stencils. Along the way, we talked about growing up in the South Bronx surrounded by graffiti and hip hop, sketching at the Met as a kid, spending three years making black moon jars with a Korean ceramicist, and why, more than a decade after his Whitney retrospective, he's still searching for his big dream.
Summary:
00:00 Welcome to Glenn Ligon's studio
01:09 The archive
02:54 Copying kids' drawings
04:19 What his work is about
05:46 Why coal dust?
06:55 Neon and light
07:44 Stencils and letterforms
08:59 Why his paintings are hard to read
09:41 Graffiti, hip hop and the South Bronx
10:40 Drawing at the Met as a kid
13:01 Black moon jars
14:22 Still searching for the big dream
15:26 What he hopes you take away
16:39 Advice to artists
18:06 Rapid fire" from the video introduction
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