20/09/2024 - 02/03/2025
Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place at the Fitzwilliam Museum
This autumn, the Fitzwilliam Museum will present Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place, a major exhibition by one of the leading contemporary artists working today. Alongside two dedicated galleries of Ligon’s own artwork from the past 35 years, including paintings, sculptures and prints, All Over The Place will comprise a series of site-specific interventions curated by the artist throughout the museum aimed at revealing new perspectives on its collection and Ligon’s own artistic career.
Since the late 1980s, New York-based artist Glenn Ligon (b.1960) has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He is best known for his landmark neon installations and text-based paintings which draw on the influential writings and speech of 20th-century historical and cultural figures including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. Visitors to the Fitzwilliam will be greeted with Ligon’s major 9-part neon sculpture Waiting for the Barbarians (2021) installed in the museum’s Neoclassical Grade I listed portico entrance, marking the work’s UK debut. Inside, a significant presentation of Ligon’s text-based paintings including Mirror #9 (2006) and Stranger #90 (2018), as well as an important early work, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), (1990), will transform the museum’s Octagon gallery.