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In a show at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam museum, the leading US artist highlights how identity, culture and history in art is contingent on who is doing the lookingWhen Glenn Ligon was first invited to create a show of his text paintings, drawings and neon sculptures at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, he took a walk through the museum’s lofty neoclassical galleries. In the Italian Renaissance room, there was a rehang in progress and one bare wall caught the leading US artist’s eye. “It was gold burlap wallpaper that had faded to coppery brown, except where paintings had been removed,” he recalls. “You saw the original gold. I thought, that’s an exhibition in itself right there.” These ghostly traces of previous displays ruptured what’s meant to be a neutral backdrop to works of art. “A museum’s job is to present objects as if they’re in an icebox, unchanged forever,” he says. “You can make other choices. There are other possibilities.”That identity, culture and history are contingent on who is doing the looking has long been central to Ligon’s work. One of his origin stories as an artist is how, in 1984, he realised his studio mate had never even heard of his literary idol, the gay black novelist and activist, James Baldwin. He began quoting directly from Baldwin and marginalised writers like Jean Genet and Zora Neale Hurston in what would become his signature: paintings that wed abstraction to identity politics. His work often features stencilled text in blurred black pigment and coal dust pushing the words into illegibility, partly to convey their cultural invisibility. This year is Baldwin’s centenary and, Ligon says, “there’s a lot of Baldwin in this show”, including a text painting that directly quotes his 1953 essay Stranger in the Village where he muses on being the lone black man in a Swiss backwater. Continue reading...