COLUMBUS, OH.- The internationally touring survey Glenn Ligon: Some Changes, featuring more than 40 provocative pieces in a wide variety of mediums, makes its only Midwestern stop at the Wexner Center January 26–April 15, 2007. A noted African American artist who came to prominence in the 1980s, Glenn Ligon is known for work that investigates social, linguistic, and political aspects of race, gender, and sexuality. Incorporating sources as diverse as James Baldwin’s literary texts, photographic scrapbooks, and Richard Pryor’s standup comedy routines, Ligon’s practice encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, video, text-based work, and web-based projects. This survey, covering nearly two decades in Ligon’s career, highlights moments in his work where existing texts, images, and themes from popular culture, literature, and history are “revised” in subsequent pieces and in new mediums.

Notes Helen Molesworth, the Wexner Center’s chief curator of exhibitions, “Glenn Ligon’s artistic range—from painting to printmaking to neon sculpture—combined with his interest in questions of American identity make him one of the most compelling artists of his generation.”

This spring’s Director’s Dialogue on Art and Social Change, featuring leading artists and writers, will focus on issues surrounding cultural conflict, identity, and freedom of expression—issues that are at the forefront of Ligon’s work and the current political climate. The Director’s Dialogue will be held Tuesday, April 10 at 7 pm at the Wexner Center; admission is free.

This exhibition was organized by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. The tour has included the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (summer 2005) and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (fall 2006); following its Wexner Center presentation, the show will travel to The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia (summer 2007) and Mudam (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean) in Luxembourg in the fall of 2007. A catalogue of the show is available in the Wexner Center Store ($49.95).

Weaving through the last 17 years of Ligon’s career, Some Changes provides a rare opportunity to view early projects such as Untitled (I Am A Man) (1988), a painting that cites the 1968 protest slogan of striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, and Runaways (1993), in which Ligon mimics the rhetoric and typography of 19th-century runaway notices, replacing the content with autobiographical material. Newer artistic concerns are evident in more recent works, such as the installation The Orange and Blue Feelings (2003), an unusually shot video documentary work about a therapy session. Other highlights of the survey include The Richard Pryor Paintings (1993–2004), a series of vibrant text paintings that bring Pryor’s raw jokes to visual life, and Warm Broad Glow (2005), Ligon’s latest sculpture—a large-scale, pulsating neon light that renews and recharges the phrase “negro sunshine” that appears in a Gertrude Stein work. “Across the spectrum of race and sexuality, Ligon questions the relations between self and shadow, master and slave—how he experiences them internally and with respect to others,” wrote Art + Auction magazine in a review of the show.

Glenn Ligon has had solo shows at such institutions as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. He was in Documenta XI in Kassel (2002), the XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo (1998), and the Venice Biennale (1997), among many other group shows. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Matters, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A Bronx native, he currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Glenn Ligon: Some Changes is cocurated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Thelma Golden and is organized by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto. With the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace Walter Goldsmith Foundation, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Albert & Temmy Latner Foundation and Toby Devan Lewis. Additional support is provided by Hal Jackman Foundation, Judy Schulich, The Broad Art Foundation, Gregory R. Miller, The Drake Hotel, The Linda Pace Foundation and Dr. Kenneth Montague. It is presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts with support from the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members. Accommodations are provided by The Blackwell Inn.