"A five-year-old’s relationship to an image of Malcolm X on a coloring book page is that it’s simply an image to color, but for an adult—me—trying to make a drawing or a painting based on a five-year-old’s drawing of Malcolm X that has lipstick and blue eye shadow has to deal with all the ramifications of defacing an icon and think about how adult viewers are going to respond to that defaced image."
Malcolm X (version 1) #1, from 2000, is a pivotal example of Glenn Ligon's singular ability to capture the complexities of sociopolitical and cultural histories. One of the most astute observers of history and identity politics in America, Ligon explores in this body of work the representation of Black bodies across generations and the intersectionality of identities. Malcolm X (version 1) #1 marks the first and most recognizable example of Ligon's critically acclaimed Coloring Book series. In Malcolm X (version 1) #1, Ligon appropriates and enlarges black history coloring books from the 1960s and 1970s that were intended to illustrate racial pride and iconic historical figures. The series epitomizes Ligon's career-long investigation of appropriation and text, pushing the boundaries of legibility in the image of a controversial, politicized icon to a level of abstraction and complicating its meaning through the deconstruction of color in his painterly Pop-inspired brushwork. Emphasizing the significance of this series as one of the most celebrated of Ligon’s career, works from this series are held in the permanent collects ion of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Rubell Museum, among others. Debuting at Coloring: New Work by Glenn Ligon, Glenn Ligon's solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Malcolm X (version 1) #1 is a superlative work within the series and was prominently exhibited at Ligon's seminal exhibition Glenn Ligon: AMERICA at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2011.
Glenn Ligon’s Coloring Book Paintings in Museum collects ions
As Ligon notes in his artist stat.mes nt for the Walker Art Center, "I also love children's drawings because kids' relationship to culture, language, and identity is not yet fixed. They haven't yet ingested all the rules and prohibitions adults have, so there is no one way that things have to be in their drawings." (Glenn Ligon quoted in: Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Coloring: New Work by Glenn Ligon, 2000-01) Ligon employs the irreverent styles of children's drawings as a paradigm for applying paint to his own canvases, which are silkscreened with the outlines of the coloring book illustrations. Through his method of combining silkscreen with painting, Ligon consciously evokes Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In Malcolm X (version 1) #1, the lipstick, blush, and eye shadow belie the historical import of the image itself. Ligon attributes the freedom and painterliness of his use of color to Andy Warhol. Through the striking results of this process, Ligon examines the legibility of black bodies and identities. Like in Andy Warhol's depictions of Marilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao, Ligon's work investigates seriality in depictions of iconic figures, particularly the controversial figure of Malcolm X, revealing an incisive cultural mirror and investigation into the historical potency of images. Malcolm X (version 1) #1 questions the nature of representation through the irreverent defacing of culturally iconic images. Dichotomously playful and jarring, the present work examines the ways in which image and representation are socially constructed and passed on between generations.
In 2001, during his residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Ligon gave local multiracial children between the ages of three and nine coloring books with Black Power imagery, employing books designed to normalize images of Black Americans. These publications were for and by Black people, providing a platform for positive representation during the civil rights era. Largely ignorant of the historical charge and resonance of these images, the children responded predominantly to color, illustrating Malcolm X with a white complexion, blue eye shadow, rosy lips, and red cheeks. Ligon lines the monumental portrait of the Black Nationalist leader with swathes of paint, creating a graphic flattening of the image. Within the series, Ligon confronts the viewer with the defaced images of Black Power icons, exploring the emotional charge of depictions of historical figures across generations. He prompts the viewer to question one's own response to the representation of a masculine Black cultural figure, illustrated as if in drag with stark makeup and white hair. In so doing, Ligon highlights and examines our response to means of representation, challenging the viewer to consider their relationship and attention to identity politics, sexuality, and race.
"The drawings have an innocent, unproblematic relationship to questions of race, identity, etc., because the images they are coloring on don’t.mes an anything to the kids … Everything that comes to mind when I see an image of Malcolm X – his speeches on 125th Street, his red hair, the trip to Mecca, how handsome he was – got mixed in my head with the way the kids colored in the image, and that made the paintings something more than I expected them to be."
Malcolm X (version 1) #1 embodies the tenants of Ligon's artistic practice, examining appropriation, the multiplicity of viewpoints, and depictions of Blackness in America. Ligon describes an optimism in his appropriation of coloring book produced with the desire for black liberation, saying, 'Each generation makes the Malcolm X they need'. (Ligon, quoted in Liverpool, Tate Liverpool, AfroModern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic, 2010, p.78) In Malcolm X (version 1) #1, Ligon examines the charge of iconic images and the polar regard by which different races and generations see Malcolm X. By rendering the irreverent children's defacement of Malcolm X on a monumental scale, Ligon holds a mirror to society, revealing the charge of specific images, interrogating the intricacies of a symbol and our instinctual reactions to depictions of a controversial figure. Employing the symbolic poeticism of a children's coloring book and a striking, historically potent visual image, Malcolm X (version 1) #1 is an exquisite example of both Ligon's singular conceptual artistic vocabulary and career-long exploration of questions of race and representation.
