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Lot Essay
One of the most important works from Glenn Ligon’s early body of work, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) is the first of the artist’s Door Paintings, a series of twenty-one works which established his reputation as one of the most influential voices in contemporary painting. Exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 1991, it is one of the first paintings in which Ligon used text to explore the nature of the Black experience. By taking a single line from a seminal essay by the influential writer Zora Neale Hurston and repeating it over and over again until it dissolves into illegibility, the painting acts as a powerful metaphor for the highly constructed nature of race and identity.
On an imposing panel support, Ligon repeatedly stencils the line “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” one word at a time. The artist first came across this unique support after he became frustrated with constantly moving a spare door around his studio in the Clockwork Building in Lower Manhattan. After shifting the door one too many times, he suddenly realized that it would make the perfect surface for his paintings due to its uncompromising nature, making it highly suitable for holding the marks produced by his oil stick stencil. In addition, its anthropomorphic shape and scale was ideal for works that often dealt with the body and the self.
As Ligon stencils each word, he is required to make a series of decisions with regards to its placement and how much white space to leave between each word. When these seemingly insignificant choices are considered cumulatively, they begin to take on a much greater significance. It is in this respect that Ligon’s choice of text and the method of its realization come together as the raised forms of the words set against the stark white ground manifest, in part, the sentiment in Hurston’s original text. As Scott Rothkopf, the curator of Ligon’s critically acclaimed 2011 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, explains: “…if Hurston’s moving essay relates to her sudden and painful recognition of her blackness, in the precarious differentiation of a letter from its ground and from the marks adjacent to it acts as the perfect embodiment of her fraught discovery” (“Glenn Ligon: AMERICA” in S. Rothkopf et al., Glenn Ligon AMERICA, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011, p. 28).
Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, anthropologist and documentary film maker. She made her name writing about the contemporary issues that faced the Black community in the United States and became a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In her 1928 essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me she explores her experiences of being Black in a society that emphasizes racial differences, before ultimately concluding that she must embrace her identity and see herself as a part of a larger, universal experience. Together with his appropriation of texts by other prominent Black American writers such as Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man) and James Baldwin (Stranger in the Village), Ligon’s choice of Hurston signals the struggles of African Americans to claim agency and voice in white America.
Rothkopf argues that close analysis of Ligon’s process and his choice of subject is crucial to understanding the full potential of this painting: “…it is only by carefully considering Ligon’s process that we are attuned to the great range of expression in his paintings…the text alone had become the image, the vehicle of his painterly concerns. He could say something in his art and still work within the field of painting, and those two activities were no longer antagonistic but one and the same” (ibid., pp. 26-28).
Widely exhibited, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) stands as an important contribution to the history of American contemporary painting. Its astute melding of subject and process results in a painting that is both visually arresting and conceptually powerful. Ligon would build upon these Door Paintings to produce a powerful body of work, resulting in him becoming one of the most important and respected voices in contemporary art.
On an imposing panel support, Ligon repeatedly stencils the line “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” one word at a time. The artist first came across this unique support after he became frustrated with constantly moving a spare door around his studio in the Clockwork Building in Lower Manhattan. After shifting the door one too many times, he suddenly realized that it would make the perfect surface for his paintings due to its uncompromising nature, making it highly suitable for holding the marks produced by his oil stick stencil. In addition, its anthropomorphic shape and scale was ideal for works that often dealt with the body and the self.
As Ligon stencils each word, he is required to make a series of decisions with regards to its placement and how much white space to leave between each word. When these seemingly insignificant choices are considered cumulatively, they begin to take on a much greater significance. It is in this respect that Ligon’s choice of text and the method of its realization come together as the raised forms of the words set against the stark white ground manifest, in part, the sentiment in Hurston’s original text. As Scott Rothkopf, the curator of Ligon’s critically acclaimed 2011 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, explains: “…if Hurston’s moving essay relates to her sudden and painful recognition of her blackness, in the precarious differentiation of a letter from its ground and from the marks adjacent to it acts as the perfect embodiment of her fraught discovery” (“Glenn Ligon: AMERICA” in S. Rothkopf et al., Glenn Ligon AMERICA, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011, p. 28).
Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, anthropologist and documentary film maker. She made her name writing about the contemporary issues that faced the Black community in the United States and became a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In her 1928 essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me she explores her experiences of being Black in a society that emphasizes racial differences, before ultimately concluding that she must embrace her identity and see herself as a part of a larger, universal experience. Together with his appropriation of texts by other prominent Black American writers such as Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man) and James Baldwin (Stranger in the Village), Ligon’s choice of Hurston signals the struggles of African Americans to claim agency and voice in white America.
Rothkopf argues that close analysis of Ligon’s process and his choice of subject is crucial to understanding the full potential of this painting: “…it is only by carefully considering Ligon’s process that we are attuned to the great range of expression in his paintings…the text alone had become the image, the vehicle of his painterly concerns. He could say something in his art and still work within the field of painting, and those two activities were no longer antagonistic but one and the same” (ibid., pp. 26-28).
Widely exhibited, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) stands as an important contribution to the history of American contemporary painting. Its astute melding of subject and process results in a painting that is both visually arresting and conceptually powerful. Ligon would build upon these Door Paintings to produce a powerful body of work, resulting in him becoming one of the most important and respected voices in contemporary art.