Tag: glenn ligon

I have loved Glenn Ligon’s Moon Jars since they first appeared in “In A Year with a Black Moon” in 2019, in what turned out to be the last show at Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo. And by love, I mean hearted them every time I’ve seen them on Instagram.

Their narrative hasn’t changed much in the intervening years, though: Ligon developed them with a Korean ceramicist in Japan over three years. They’re made with black clay instead of the kaolin white clay of Joseon originals. The rest of the discussion quickly shifts to Moon Jars themselves, and their history, and even that can be a very short conversation.

Glenn Adamson, who posted about Ligon’s Moon Jars installed at the Fitzwilliam in 2024 went on to write for FT about the record-setting Joseon Moon Jar from Christie’s in 2023 turning up at Frieze Seoul in 2025. And that article got scraped into the lot essay glazing the next Important Moon Jar at Christie’s last spring.

Meanwhile, the Hauser & Wirth exhibition of Ligon’s Moon Jars in Seoul last month seems almost invisible—except for this video of Ligon talking about them himself for Frieze Seoul 2026. There are insights into the cultural specificities of blackness, and the celebrated imperfections of the moon jar’s fabrication, both concepts that resonate deeply with Ligon’s larger practice.

But there’s no hint yet about Korean responses to these reworkings of an iconic national form, or to its complicated historical entanglements with western Modernism, and with Japan.

From Instagram, at least, Ligon’s long, personal and creative engagement with Japan appears steady and extensive, going well beyond tourism or fandom. And it’s easy to imagine an organic and productive context for the Moon Jars’ development.

But imagining is all there is, because I don’t see any more discussion of their origins or their making. Or in the moon jars’ intersections with Japanese colonialism, and the complicated dynamics around the elevation of simplified, utilitarian ceramics in the early 20th century by Japanese craft modernists like Sōetsu Yanagi, and then by modernists in the west It feels relevant that both of the major Joseon moon jars at Christie’s came from deep in Japanese collections—and that rather than discuss their provenance at all, Christie’s rehashed the Anglo-centric story of the moon jar at the British Museum.

In contrast, Ligon just unveiled another sculpture of fired clay, where the complex context of who made what, how, and where, feels baked right in. For Coyote Time, the triennial in St Louis organized by Counterpublic, Ligon has created Who Builds Anything In This Country? a serpentine wall of handmade bricks marked with the fingerprints and marks of local students and seniors. This, in a state and a country where, before the Civil War, most bricks were made by enslaved people.

There’s a fuller moon jar discussion to be had, and almost ten years into Ligon’s project, I cannot be the only one who’d love to have it. I’d also like to see them in person.

In retrospect it felt kind of remarkable that Glenn Ligon’s High Line billboard was installed in September 2024 even before [gestures around] all this. But then, there was a lot going on then, too. And the image itself has some history to it.

Of Untitled (America/Me), 2024, The High Line only said, “For this work, the artist manipulated a photograph of his 2008 neon,” which is true enough. In 2022, though, Ligon made a little edition, Untitled (America/Me), 2022, of a photo of America (2008) with Xs drawn by hand, which was split between Texte zur Kunst, Primary Information, and the Carré d’Art Nimes.

That work, or that image, at least, looks to be the same one the High Line calls Untitled (2008), but also the same as the Rubells use to illustrate their AP of America (2008). Which is different from the Tate’s Untitled (2006), the earliest version of a neon AMERICA, in which the tubes are painted completely black.

Anyway, in his conversation with Charlotte Burns on the new episode of Schwartzman &’s podcast, What If…? Ligon explains the billboard’s origin in more detail:

So, when I was approached by the High Line to do this billboard project, I went back to not actually the work, I actually went back to a postcard I had sent someone. There was an invitation, I guess for show that had that 2008 America neon in it, and I just took that postcard and mailed it to a friend and crossed out all the letters of America and left the “m” and “e”. 

When I started thinking about that billboard I just happened to be at a dinner party at my friend’s house, and I saw that little postcard I sent them that they very kindly kept and put in a frame, and I thought, “Oh, that’s not bad.” [Laughs] So, I basically borrowed back my own work to make that billboard. 

Though a postcard-sized print does seem like a non-trivial phase in the transformation from postcard to artwork, Ligon does not mention this 2022 edition. Yet the insights Ligon shares about that process of recognition are not negated, only pushed back in time a little bit.

I’ve listened to a couple of interesting interviews now where Glenn Ligon talks about Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place, the show he’s organized of his work and the collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Now it turns out there’s a benefit print for the show.

It’s a digital print based on one of his recent drawings he calls Kozo Drawings on his site, after the kind of paper (mulberry). In the edition description, they’re explained as frottage, graphite rubbings Ligon made of the craggy surface of his own paintings. In this case, it’s a painting of a text from James Baldwin.

There’s something interesting about Ligon adding another layer to the mediation of his text pictures, particularly when it depends on their [also] being an object. Then there’s something else when the rough, fragile, abradedd sheet is translated to an ultrasmooth print. It feels almost like a facsimile. [And speaking of which, I can’t lie, as interesting as the print and drawings are, it was the sleek black envelope the print ships in that pushed me over the blogging edge. I’ve been making janky versions for Facsimile Objects, and this looks so much sleeker.]

Ironically, the prints were produced at Griffin in NYC, but now will ship from the UK. All for a good cause, though.

Glenn Ligon, Untitled, 2024 Limited Edition Print, GBP 1200 or so [curatingcambridge.co.uk via ig/@glennligon] [sept 2026 internet archive link update: I cannot believe the thousand year old university with the museum whose paintings move so little their faded velvet wallcoverings become the artist’s whole-ass installation just delete the page for his print edition when it sells out, I guess, and redirect it to their Cambridge X lululemon collab.]

I wish I’d known about these before David Hudson posted one to wish Steve Reich a happy 88th birthday. Because I am transfixed.

Continue reading “On Steve Reich’s Freehand Watermark Tracings and Patterns”

Kelley Walker, Schema Aquafresh plus Crest with tartar control, 2003, digital file, image: camstl.org
I am not at all ready to address the discussion and protests surrounding the exhibition of Kelley Walker’s work at CAM St Louis, but the statement by Paula Cooper caught me up. “The role of the artist, it has been said, is to ask questions, not answer them.” Chekhov said that, and he’s not wrong, but not right enough, either.
And KareemEstefan responded, in a tweet exchange with Pedro Velez, “True–but does Walker know what Qs his art is asking?”
That reminded me of the paragraph I’d cut from the top of Mirta D’Argenzio’s Rauschenberg essay I quoted yesterday. I am pretty sure this is the artist speaking:

“Gertrude Stein said on her death bed when they asked her what the answer was and she said, ‘What is the question?’ So I have to keep the question changing. The only way to do that is with an open mind.” It’s rather like the riddle of the sphinx. Rauschenberg, the insatiable, suggests that the riddle be left unsolved, and indicates that the very purpose of art is to keep changing its questions.

The very purpose of art is to keep changing its questions.
It seems to me that this is what is happening to Walker and his work in the 13 years since he made it. Not only have the questions changed, the audience has, too. And sounds like neither the artist, the curator, nor the institution understood that.
The sharpest thinking I’ve seen on Walker’s work is still Glenn Ligon’s essay in Parkett from 2010 [pdf]. Ligon finds the utter insufficiency of thought or discussion around Walker’s use of black imagery to be significant in itself, both a “dilemma” and a source of “enormous vitality.” He correctly identified “Kelley Walker’s Negro Problem” as the art world’s problem, too. And America’s. He’s still right.