Artists Space

OCTOBER Files: Glenn Ligon

Book Launch
Wednesday, September 16
7pm
Free, no RSVP required

Please join us to celebrate the publication of OCTOBER Files: Glenn Ligon with a reception, book signing, and conversation. Artist Glenn Ligon and the volume’s editor, Huey Copeland, will be joined by art historian Pamela M. Lee for a discussion of Ligon’s work and the new book.

OCTOBER Files: Glenn Ligon presents the first compilation of critical discourse on the multimedia work of one of the most influential American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Often citing or annotating past literary (e.g., James Baldwin), artistic (e.g., Andy Warhol), and musical (e.g., Steve Reich) interventions, Ligon’s practice imaginatively explores the contradictions of speech, vision, authorship, identity, blackness, and belonging in works that are at once historically resonant and materially sensuous.

Spanning Ligon’s emergence in the postmodern multicultural milieu of New York in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, his starring turns at Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and other international exhibitions of the 2000–2010s, and his formative impact on both new and canonical art histories, this volume provides a comprehensive accounting of the questions central to his work in painting, sculpture, video, installation, and print. With texts by writers from Wayne Koestenbaum to Rizvana Bradley, this File not only plumbs the depths of Ligon’s oeuvre but also models the various approaches to critical writing that have defined art and culture of the past 30 years.

Huey Copeland is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh. An editor of the journal October, he specializes in visual cultures of the African diaspora, Europe, and the United States. Copeland’s interdisciplinary research and teaching push art history against the grain to reveal the constitutive relationship between the capture of black life and the production of cultural property in the modern West. He is the author of two books, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (2013) and Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons (2026) both published by University of Chicago Press.

Pamela M. Lee is Carnegie Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. She is the author of Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War and the Neoliberal Present (MIT Press, 2020). A co-editor of October, Lee is researching the concept of small wars and everyday militarism in contemporary art.

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon 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 earned his BA from Wesleyan University (1982) and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1985). In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective, AMERICA, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important solo exhibitions include Glenn Ligon: Break It Down, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2025); All Over the Place, The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, England (2024); Post-Noir, Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); Call and Response, Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); and Some Changes, The Power Plant Center for Contemporary Art, Toronto (traveled internationally) (2005). Select curatorial projects include Grief and Grievance, New Museum, New York (2021); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2017); and Encounters and Collisions, Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool, England (2015). Ligon’s work has been shown in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2019, 2011), and Documenta XI (2002).

Artists Space Venue is generously supported by Stephen Cheng, Allan Schwartzman, and David Zwirner.