The Brant Foundation, that curious intersection of blue-chip patronage and post-industrial chic in Manhattan’s East Village, is turning its gaze to one of America’s most incisive cultural surgeons: Glenn Ligon. Opening on May 21, this latest exhibition does not merely present Ligon—it stages a confrontation. With words that bruise and neon that glares, Ligon demands the viewer not look away from the uncomfortable—history, identity, exclusion—those shadowy structures that scaffold the American narrative.
Ligon is no stranger to textual intensity. His work hums with the stuttering pulse of repetition—phrases lifted from Baldwin, Hurston, and Reich disintegrate into abstraction, as in Come Out #4 (2014), a visual echo of Steve Reich’s 1966 sound piece about the Harlem Six. Here, language becomes both the subject and the wound: “come out to show them” is not a request, it’s a haunting. The text accumulates, smudges, and collapses under its own weight. It is minimalism weaponized, a formal rigor carrying unbearable emotional freight.
Throughout, there is a sense of America not as an ideal but as a mask—one worn backwards. Rückenfigur (2009), a chilling neon piece spelling “AMERICA” in glowing capital letters that turn their back on the viewer, performs this estrangement literally. The viewer is denied the spectacle, forced to confront absence. It’s Ligon at his most unforgiving and perhaps his most honest: this is a nation that beams outward but hides its core.
This exhibition does not flatter the audience with resolution. It implicates, disorients, and interrogates. Ligon’s practice slices clean through nostalgia’s gauze in a cultural moment where the past is anything but past. The Brant Foundation offers a pristine white cube for this reckoning, but the questions that linger—about who we see, who we ignore, and who’s allowed to speak—are anything but tidy.
