He's Barack Obama's favourite artist. But is Britain ready for Glenn Ligon?

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/apr/02/glenn-ligon-artist-obama-favourite-encounters-collisions-interview
<snip>
The beautiful, powerful paintings of Glenn Ligon hang in museums around the world, but there is one artwork of his you can’t see – not since 2009, at least. To catch a glimpse of his 1992 canvas Black Like Me No 2, which reproduces a text by a white journalist posing as a black man in the deep south, you would have to be very good friends with a certain art-lover in Washington DC.

“It’s in the private quarters of the White House,” Ligon says when I visit him in his Brooklyn studio. “So I can’t see it. But I met Obama once, backstage at the Apollo in Harlem. I was with my friend and a woman said, ‘I wonder if you have a moment to meet the president?’ And, you know, we had dinner reservations – but OK. So we go downstairs and there’s Obama with the chief of staff, who says, ‘Mr President, this is Glenn Ligon. Black Like Me No 2 is in your personal quarters.’ And Obama looks at me and goes, ‘Oh, yeah, we have a set of prints too! But they had to move them out, because of the light. I really miss them.’”
A white Malcolm X and a topless Black Panther: Obama's favourite artist carves up the past – in pictures

Ligon cackles at the memory. “I thought, ‘Oh wait, this is real! They live with art, they take their children to look at art, they’re not scared of artists. This is not some bullshit. This is not on his talking points. I was super impressed.”

The president is hardly the only admirer of Ligon, whose exhibition Encounters and Collisions opens at Nottingham Contemporary this week, before touring to Tate Liverpool in July. Rather than mount a traditional retrospective, Ligon has instead curated a bold, peculiar history of postwar art, with works by more than 40 artists who have influenced him, making up what amounts to his own personal museum. He’s included older painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, icons of black contemporary art like David Hammons, as well as underappreciated figures like Beauford Delaney. There are also artists who tackle LGBT issues, including Félix González-Torres and Zoe Leonard, and seven works of Ligon’s own, including a colouring-book picture of Malcolm X, in which the black activist has been left with white skin.

[lovemydog]

1. Very interesting art.

Thanks for sharing the article!

[malaise]

2. You're welcome

[BumRushDaShow]

3. Here's what "Black Like Me No. 2" looks like

[irisblue]

4. and Mr Obama has to live this way, every day....

oh yes, the artist is good

[malaise]

5. Thank you