Excessive Line Artwork, the art-commissioning arm of the Excessive Line in New York’s Chelsea neighbourhood, is relaunching its billboard sequence on 3 September with a brand new work by Glenn Ligon. The piece, Untitled (America/Me) (2022/2024), extends the conceptual artist’s signature sequence of text-based work and neon sculptures excerpting landmark writings and speeches to deal with themes associated to historical past and id in the US.
Ligon’s work would be the first to grace a freshly rebuilt, 25ft-by-75ft billboard at 18th Avenue close to tenth Avenue, adjoining to the Excessive Line within the coronary heart of Chelsea. Excessive Line Artwork plans to put in a brand new commissioned billboard there each two months.
Untitled (America/Me) consists of a monumental picture of the artist’s 2022 neon work of the identical title. That piece is itself an replace of Ligon’s 2008 neon piece Untitled, whose flickering lights spelling out “AMERICA” symbolised the optimism and ambivalence within the air as Barack Obama was elected because the nation’s first Black president. When Ligon revisited the work in 2022, he positioned black Xs over each letter besides the “M” and “E”—a mirrored image on the conceptual complexity of citizenship and the Black expertise within the US.
“The phrase ‘America’ is eclipsed, and the blackening of the letters provides a layer of ambiguity,” Ligon tells The Artwork Newspaper. “I don’t know that I used to be considering notably of this political second, as a result of who might have predicted this second? However it’s well timed as we replicate on our goal as a nation and as people.”
He provides: “Traditionally, Black People haven’t been included within the class of residents. That’s a reasonably current growth. The assaults on Kamala Harris from the proper—that she’s a communist, a Marxist, a foreigner and so forth—immediate the identical form of questioning across the chance that citizenship doesn’t look white and male.”
Excessive Line Artwork’s authentic sequence of commissioned billboards ran for 5 years on the location on 18th Avenue. It featured works by artists similar to John Baldessari and Religion Ringgold earlier than the undertaking was discontinued in 2015. Since 2023, the organisation has been putting in billboard commissions on a smaller construction on Dyer Avenue between thirtieth and thirty first Streets, a brief distance from the Excessive Line and the Shed.
Ligon and Excessive Line Artwork’s director and chief curator, Cecilia Alemani, started engaged on a undertaking for the Excessive Line almost a decade in the past, envisioning {that a} illustration of the artist’s work could be hand-painted on a wall.
“The hand-painted picture by no means regarded good to me, in order that undertaking type of died on the vine till round six months in the past, when it turned clear the billboard would develop into accessible once more,” Ligon says. “I assumed this may be a really graphic picture. It’s not the neon, but it surely’s a good illustration of it. It’s additionally fascinating to do a undertaking in a public area, the place it’s open to interpretation in a means that’s totally different from a gallery, the place the viewers could have some familiarity with my work.”
Different works from the artist’s AMERICA sequence are concurrently on view all through New York Metropolis. Lately reinstalled within the foyer gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Artwork is Rückenfigur (2009), a painted neon piece through which a number of the letters have been reversed to face the wall. Primarily based on the work of Caspar David Friedrich, Rückenfigur was first put in on the museum in 2011 as a part of a mid-career survey exhibition on Ligon.
The second-floor galleries of the Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) are additionally exhibiting his Heat Broad Glow (2005), one other painted neon work that references Gertrude Stein’s 1909 novel Three Lives. The letters spell out the phrases “negro sunshine”, invoking a citation within the guide about detrimental Black stereotypes.
- Glenn Ligon: Untitled (America/Me), The Excessive Line, 18th Avenue and tenth Avenue, New York, 3 September-November 2024
