Curated by Scott Rothkopf

Rightly associated with the identity-politics moment of the late 1980s, Glenn Ligon has never been wholly defined by it. Though he started with a few givens—being a gay African-American man coming of age at a time when notions of both blackness and queerness were in generative flux—Ligon used a restless intellect and a skill for evocative understatement to probe not just the particular but also the universal. This midcareer retrospective is slated to feature more than one hundred works (including paintings, prints, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations) as well as a catalogue replete with essays and a companion volume of the artist’s own writings and interviews—altogether a fitting tribute to an artist dedicated to making “language into a physical thing, something that has real weight and force to it.”

— Jeffrey Kastner