Glenn Ligon
Some Changes
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto, ON
Canada
T 416-973-4949
The Power Plant is pleased to announce a major touring exhibition of the work of New York-based artist Glenn Ligon. Ligon is at the forefront of a generation of artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s on the strength of conceptually based paintings and phototext work that investigates the social, linguistic and political construction of race, gender and sexuality. Glenn Ligon: Some Changes is an exhibition which explores the idea of revision, highlighting moments in Ligon’s practice where existing works and themes are returned to in subsequent pieces and in new mediums. Ligons practice, which incorporates sources as diverse as James Baldwin’s literary texts, photographic scrapbooks, and Richard Pryor’s stand-up comic routines, encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and video. Ligon’s art is a sustained meditation on issues of quotation, the presence of the past in the present, and the representation of the self in relationship to culture and history. Glenn Ligon: Some Changes provides an opportunity to view a significant body of the artists works, spanning from 1988 to the present. These include Untitled (I Am A Man) (1988); Runaways (1993); the Richard Pryor paintings (1993-2004); the award-winning web-based project, Annotations (2003); and the installation The Orange and Blue Feelings (2003), among others.
Co-curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, Director, The Power Plant, and Thelma Golden, Deputy Director, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
Ligons work has appeared in Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); the XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo (1998) and the Venice Biennale (1997); his extensive exhibition history also includes solo shows at Kunstverein Munich (2001); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1996); and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (1993). His work has been included in important group exhibitions such as Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004); The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1994).
This important touring exhibition opens at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery on June 24, 2005 and travels through 2007 to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (January 14 to April2, 2006), The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (September 30 to December 31, 2006), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (January 27 to April 22, 2007) and Musée dArt Moderne Grand-Duc, Luxembourg (October 6 December 17, 2007).
A 204-page, fully illustrated hard-bound catalogue, including essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Mark Nash, and an interview by Stephen Andrews, accompanies the exhibition. The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Horace Walter Goldsmith Foundation, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, Toby Devan Lewis, and the Albert and Temmy Latner Family Foundation. Additional support has been graciously provided by the Hal Jackman Foundation, Judy Schulich, Gregory R. Miller, The Drake Hotel, the Broad Art Foundation, the Linda Pace Foundation, and Dr. Kenneth Montague.
The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. and Wednesday until 8 p.m. Admission is free on Wednesdays from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. For more information visit www.thepowerplant.org
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council and Harbourfront Centre.
