11/13/2022 0 Comments Raphael legacy racial tyranny![]() Works such as ‘Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am thrown Against a Sharp White Background)’ (1990), which draws text from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me,’ or ‘Untitled (There is a consciousness we all have…)’ (1988), in which Ligon uses a comment made in the New York Times about African American artist Martin Puryear, engage not only the language itself but the visual expression of that language to comment on the subject matter. Ligon’s 1991 work ‘Untitled (I Am an Invisible Man)’ borrows lines from the 1955 Ralph Ellison novel ‘Invisible Man.’ Ligon strategically blends, muddles, and merges written words in oil stick and graphite, thereby juxtaposing presence and absence, comprehension and illegibility by claiming these words in a new context, he points to the possibility of how meaning can slip or evolve. Withers, depicting black sanitation workers striking in Memphis and carrying identical signs printed with the text ‘I AM A MAN.’ These words still carry the force of a heavy assertion: a demand for visibility and humanity in response not only to the injustices thrust upon African Americans in the present time, but also to the history of slavery, the effects of which continue to permeate the entire American experience. Among key works from this period is ‘Untitled (I Am a Man)’ (1988), an oil and enamel painting derived from a black-and-white photograph by Ernest C. Just as Guston returned to figuration after a long exploration in Abstract Expressionist painting as a response to the Vietnam War, Ligon pursued language as a means of commentary on the cultural milieu of the 1980s and ‘90s, and more specifically on African American identity within a turbulent landscape. Soon Ligon began incorporating text into his paintings, using the stenciled words that would become a hallmark of his oeuvre, in order to say more. This early deployment of objects as signifiers did not fully meet Ligon’s desire for expression: ‘I had a crisis of sorts when I realized there was too much of a gap between what I wanted to say and the means I had to say it with.’ Nevertheless, these works crystallized Ligon’s commitment to using signifiers within formalist procedures as a means to explore the complexities of deep cultural tensions. #RAPHAEL LEGACY RACIAL TYRANNY SERIES#In 1984 – 1985, Ligon spent an academic year in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, developing a series of representational drawings of iconic sculptures by European artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brâncuși, juxtaposed against images of African American hair products rendered in acrylic and ink. His early practice was grounded in painting, and his canvases of this period built upon the legacies of such Abstract Expressionist artists as Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.
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