The Bronx-born Glenn Ligon, now fifty, makes combative points of being black and being gay. Handsomely and sensitively installed by the Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf, the show communicates an appealingly complex sensibility that is subject to self-doubt and aesthetic yearning, even when it is forcefully on message. Ligon emerges as a companionable spirit in an endemic ordeal of American democracy—who we are, beset by what we are taken to be—which, most afflicts those, of course, who are most swiftly and carelessly categorized, as by skin color. Ligon’s anxiety plays out by fits and starts throughout the show, on notes that are comic or angry or just bemused. Elegance steadies him. The artist’s superb command of painterly and presentational rhetoric impresses because it has crucial work to do: it gives public poise to private conflict.
From: Unhidden Identities – A Glenn Ligon retrospective by Peter Schjeldahl, March 21, 2011, The New Yorker