In Conversation: Michael Govan and Glenn Ligon

Join us for an intimate conversation between LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan and American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon. Known for exploring race, language, identity, and history through found sources, Ligon will discuss Runaways, a series of prints based on 19th-century advertisements announcing runaway enslaved people.

This event takes place in person at LACMA. RSVP is required.

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held the mid-career retrospective Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important recent exhibitions include Glenn Ligon: Post-Noir (2022) at the Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Grief and Grievance (2021) at the New Museum, New York, where Ligon acted as a curatorial advisor; Des Parisiens Noirs at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Blue Black (2017), an exhibition Ligon curated at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis; and Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions (2015), a curatorial project organized with Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool. His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2019), Documenta XI (2002), and Gwangju Biennial (2000).