Summary
This diptych print produced by Glenn Ligon is based on the artist’s first exclusively-text painting from 1988, Untitled (I Am A Man) (Private collection). The left panel is a straightforward print of the 1988 painting while the right panel is a print that includes the overlay annotations of painting conservator Michael Duffy.
Ligon’s original 1988 painting is a reproduction of the protest placards carried by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in the spring of 1968. His canvas shares the verticality and dimensions of the striker’s placard, with a background painted in white oil paint on top of which the phrase ‘I AM A MAN’ is executed in black enamel block letters. Displaying these very few words en masse, the men vividly drew attention to the city’s long-term abuse and neglect of black employees following the deaths of two colleagues in the strike that preceded the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr (1929–1968)… (read more)
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