Glenn Ligon’s exhibition, “Break It Down,” opened at the Aspen Art Museum on Nov. 21. The show explores the artist’s work over three decades, focusing on how a portrait of the self is created by examining external sources. As a Black man, Ligon consistently uses institutional documents to show the friction between his personal life and public record. The exhibition functions as a clear survey of his strategies for making the invisible and structural tensions of identity apparent.
The exhibition occupies three rooms and 47 works. The first room is a broad survey of Ligon’s recurring motifs and strategies. One notable artwork in this room is made up of 50 screenprinted self-portraits. The pieces alternate between a front and back view of the artist’s tightly framed head and are set against bold, Warhol-esque colored backdrops. Instead of glamorizing the image into icon, the repetitions appear as distinct from each other due to printing glitches (ink streaks and exposure blowouts, among others). These variations sometimes completely obscure the figure in darkness, adding a sinister mechanical ambiguity. The 50 screenprints and their various idiosyncratic quirks seem to argue depiction is not straightforward, questioning the stable identity they may otherwise presume.
Nearby, viewers encounter teacher reports from Walden, a private progressive New York City elementary through high school where Ligon was a scholarship student. He has reproduced several of these documents as raw biographical material. One reads like an unintentionally satirical artist statement: “Glenn has a good knowledge of slavery and Black history, but finds standard social studies uninteresting and, as yet, has developed no social conscience. He tends to be politically apathetic about being Black, which is a shame.” Throughout the exhibition, Ligon engages with multiple institutional frameworks that, procedurally, define him.
Ligon outsources his biography as a consistent technique. He has said, “I am not interested in telling my own stories, I am interested in what other people have to say … The things I was interested in were already in the world and they didn’t need me to create them again.” This refusal to have the final word, preferring instead to reflect how others construct him, holds much of the work’s intensity.
For example, several works reproduce museum conservators’ reports on Ligon’s pieces in public collections. The original works, with texts like “I Am a Man” or “Black Rage,” are forced to coexist with institutional notes on condition and damage. The comparison produces a sharp, sometimes dark and funny conflict between political urgency and bureaucratic detachment. Whether Ligon is critiquing this institutional scalpel or mirroring it is left mysteriously unresolved.
The final gallery punctuates the exhibition by focusing on a painting built from James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in The Village,” a text Ligon often returns to. Baldwin, as Ligon notes, wrote it in the 1950s while living in a Swiss village whose residents had no prior relationship to Black people. The essay is Baldwin’s attempt to understand what it means to be a stranger, to understand “the fascination and fear strangers produce.”
From this textured painting, the other 24 works in the room emerge: dark, grayscale carbon and graphite rubbings that use the painting as their shared matrix to translate and reinterpret Baldwin’s words. Fragments are sometimes legible, but none are intact reproductions. Instead, the physicality of their smudging and abrasions, records of how they were made, is the primary experience. To this reporter, they feel like the residue of culture inside every individual, far removed from a true origin. The violence in their markmaking also recalls Baldwin’s essay, the difficulty in existing as a stranger.
Across the exhibition, Ligon resists being didactic. The show does not tell the viewer what to think. In fact, the power of “Break It Down” lies in its refusal, as Ligon denies the comfort of a straightforward biography. Instead, the artist is made from a collection of fragments, glitches and residues. Irreducible and complex.