Malcolm X With Rouged Cheeks, Glenn Ligon Reunites His Coloring Book Paintings Downtown
Hauser & Wirth hangs the largest group of the series in 25 years, plus a new 22-part work, through January 17.
Glenn Ligon’s Coloring Book paintings are hanging together for the first time in 25 years. Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against The Door opened September 30 at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown gallery at 901 East 3rd Street, reuniting the largest group of the series since its debut at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It runs through January 17, 2027.
Ligon conceived the series during a 1999 to 2000 residency at the Walker, working from Afrocentric coloring books of the late 1960s and early 1970s sourced from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He invited local schoolchildren to color pages from the vintage books, then reinterpreted their drawings in his own hand on large canvases, keeping each child’s palette and composition while letting his own marks improvise.
The canvases mix suns, alphabet letters and street scenes with portraits of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X. In Malcolm X, Sun, Frederick Douglass, Boy with Bubbles (Version 3) #2 (2001), both men appear with rouged cheeks, a detail taken straight from one child’s drawing, and the exhibition text likens Ligon’s color to the stylized makeup of Andy Warhol’s Mao paintings. The paintings are colorful, uninhibited and deceptively loose, a striking departure from the monochromatic, text-based work Ligon is best known for, the text says.
The show also debuts Black Panther Coloring Book #1, a new 22-part work based on a primer for adults that the artist Akinsanya Kambon illustrated in 1969. Working in black oil stick, Ligon masks each image behind a taped-off rectangle, leaving only the captions, faint traces of the drawing and his own fingerprints and smudges in view.
The same day, Hauser & Wirth also opened The Numinous, a show of Jack Whitten’s paintings and works on paper from the 1980s, on view in the same downtown gallery through January 10. Ligon has another solo show this fall, Prompts, at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, according to his studio. Velvet also covered The Sculptor After Dark, David Smith’s Spray Paintings Come to West Hollywood.
The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the Coloring Book paintings stay on the walls through January 17.
