How contemporary artist Glenn Ligon’s expansive body of work mines American history and literature to ask critical questions about modern culture.
OCTOBER Files: Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) presents the first compilation of critical discourse on the multimedia work of one of the most influential American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Often citing or annotating past literary (e.g., James Baldwin), artistic (e.g., Andy Warhol), and musical (e.g., Steve Reich) interventions, Ligon’s practice imaginatively explores the contradictions of speech, vision, authorship, identity, blackness and belonging in works that are at once historically resonant and materially sensuous.
Spanning Ligon’s emergence in the postmodern multicultural milieu of New York in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, his starring turns at Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and other international exhibitions of the 2000–10s, and his formative impact on both new and canonical art histories, this volume provides a comprehensive accounting of the questions central to his work in painting, sculpture, video, installation, and print. With texts by writers from Wayne Koestenbaum to Rizvana Bradley, this File not only plumbs the depths of Ligon’s oeuvre, but also models the various approaches to critical writing that have defined art and culture of the past 30 years.
Huey Copeland is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh. An editor of OCTOBER, his books include Bound to Appear, Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, and Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons (Chicago, 2026). A recipient of the 2019 Driskell C. Prize, Copeland currently serves on the board of directors of the Terra Foundation for American Art.
How contemporary artist Glenn Ligon’s expansive body of work mines American history and literature to ask critical questions about modern culture.
OCTOBER Files: Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) presents the first compilation of critical discourse on the multimedia work of one of the most influential American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Often citing or annotating past literary (e.g., James Baldwin), artistic (e.g., Andy Warhol), and musical (e.g., Steve Reich) interventions, Ligon’s practice imaginatively explores the contradictions of speech, vision, authorship, identity, blackness and belonging in works that are at once historically resonant and materially sensuous.
Spanning Ligon’s emergence in the postmodern multicultural milieu of New York in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, his starring turns at Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and other international exhibitions of the 2000–10s, and his formative impact on both new and canonical art histories, this volume provides a comprehensive accounting of the questions central to his work in painting, sculpture, video, installation, and print. With texts by writers from Wayne Koestenbaum to Rizvana Bradley, this File not only plumbs the depths of Ligon’s oeuvre, but also models the various approaches to critical writing that have defined art and culture of the past 30 years.
Author
Huey Copeland is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh. An editor of OCTOBER, his books include Bound to Appear, Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, and Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons (Chicago, 2026). A recipient of the 2019 Driskell C. Prize, Copeland currently serves on the board of directors of the Terra Foundation for American Art.
