GLENN LIGON

Conceived during the artist’s 1999 – 2000 residency at the museum, the celebrated series draws on Afrocentriccoloring books of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While at the Walker, Ligon invited local schoolchildren tocolor pages from these vintage publications, then reinterpreted their creations in his own hand on large-scalecanvases. The resulting paintings—colorful, uninhibited, deceptively loose—offer a striking departure from themonochromatic, text-based work for which Ligon is best known.

Sourced from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the post–Civil Rights-era images that filledthese coloring books were created as tools for teaching children the visual vocabulary of Black pride and selfrepresentation. Ligon, however, removed the historical context, reproducing them as simple coloring sheets toshare with the children in his workshops as an invitation to draw unencumbered. Initially attempting to replicatetheir spontaneous marks precisely at scale, Ligon soon discovered that the children’s wonderfully unguardedgestures could not be replicated. He reinterpreted their drawings, preserving each child’s palette and compositionwhile allowing his own hand to improvise, translating young, unfettered gestures into deliberate marks.

Across his Coloring Book canvases, Ligon isolates and recombines imagery—suns, alphabet letters, streetscenes—with portraits of such historical Black figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X.Multiple versions of paintings come from the same template: marks pile up in dense thickets of pigment in someworks while just a few strategically placed blooms of color are enough to animate a face in others. While Ligon’stactic of repeated templates recalls the mass production of the original educational coloring books, each paintingtakes on its own meaning. The children’s instinctive, unselfconscious marks combined with Ligon’s considered,conceptually informed interventions render layers of meaning and association and invite multiple interpretations.In ‘Malcolm X, Sun, Frederick Douglass, Boy with Bubbles (Version 3) #2’ (2001), both of the titular historical figuresappear with rouged cheeks, a detail taken directly from one child’s drawing. Ligon’s color application recalls thestylized make-up of Andy Warhol’s Mao paintings. But where Warhol drew parallels between propaganda andconsumer culture, Ligon foregrounds education’s role in constructing identity and reinforcing stereotypes. Bothplayful and unsettling, the Coloring Book paintings expose how elusive representation can be, hinging on thetension between children’s untutored imagination and the historically informed perspective only an adult can bear.This friction squares with Ligon’s broader interest in abstraction and legibility, typifying his approach to strippinglegibility not to obscure meaning but to enable its multiplicities to surface.

Alongside the Coloring Book paintings, the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth will debut Ligon’s ‘Black Panther ColoringBook #1,’ a new 22-part work based on a political primer for adults illustrated in 1969 by artist Akinsanya Kambonand later circulated by the FBI to discredit the Panthers. Working in black oil stick, Ligon masks each imagebehind a taped-off rectangle, leaving only captions, faint traces of the drawing, and his own fingerprints andsmudges visible. Degrees of concealment shift from page to page in a studied obscurity that turns withholdingitself into a form of meaning.

Throughout ‘Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against The Door,’ Ligon returns to existing historical images as material thatcan be revisited, reinterpreted and transformed, accruing new significance as the context changes.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.