High Line Art, the art-commissioning arm of the High Line in New York’s Chelsea neighbourhood, is relaunching its billboard series on 3 September with a new work by Glenn Ligon. The piece, Untitled (America/Me) (2022/2024), extends the conceptual artist’s signature series of text-based paintings and neon sculptures excerpting landmark writings and speeches to address themes related to history and identity in the United States.
Ligon’s work will be the first to grace a freshly rebuilt, 25ft-by-75ft billboard at 18th Street near 10th Avenue, adjacent to the High Line in the heart of Chelsea. High Line Art plans to install a new commissioned billboard there every two months.
Untitled (America/Me) consists of a monumental photo of the artist’s 2022 neon work of the same title. That piece is itself an update of Ligon’s 2008 neon piece Untitled, whose flickering lights spelling out “AMERICA” symbolised the optimism and ambivalence in the air as Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s first Black president. When Ligon revisited the work in 2022, he placed black Xs over every letter except the “M” and “E”—a reflection on the conceptual complexity of citizenship and the Black experience in the US.
“The word ‘America’ is eclipsed, and the blackening of the letters adds a layer of ambiguity,” Ligon tells The Art Newspaper. “I don’t know that I was thinking particularly of this political moment, because who could have predicted this moment? But it’s timely as we reflect on our purpose as a nation and as individuals.”
He adds: “Historically, Black Americans have not been included in the category of citizens. That’s a fairly recent development. The attacks on Kamala Harris from the right—that she’s a communist, a Marxist, a foreigner and so on—prompt the same sort of questioning around the possibility that citizenship does not look white and male.”
High Line Art’s original series of commissioned billboards ran for five years at the location on 18th Street. It featured works by artists such as John Baldessari and Faith Ringgold before the project was discontinued in 2015. Since 2023, the organisation has been installing billboard commissions on a smaller structure on Dyer Avenue between 30th and 31st Streets, a short distance from the High Line and the Shed.
Ligon and High Line Art’s director and chief curator, Cecilia Alemani, began working on a project for the High Line nearly a decade ago, envisioning that a representation of the artist’s work would be hand-painted on a wall.
“The hand-painted image never looked good to me, so that project kind of died on the vine until around six months ago, when it became clear the billboard would become available again,” Ligon says. “I thought this would be a very graphic image. It’s not the neon, but it’s a fair representation of it. It’s also interesting to do a project in a public space, where it’s open to interpretation in a way that’s different from a gallery, where the audience may have some familiarity with my work.”
Other works from the artist’s AMERICA series are concurrently on view throughout New York City. Recently reinstalled in the lobby gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art is Rückenfigur (2009), a painted neon piece in which some of the letters have been reversed to face the wall. Based on the work of Caspar David Friedrich, Rückenfigur was first installed at the museum in 2011 as part of a mid-career survey exhibition on Ligon.
The second-floor galleries of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are also exhibiting his Warm Broad Glow (2005), another painted neon work that references Gertrude Stein’s 1909 novel Three Lives. The letters spell out the words “negro sunshine”, invoking a quotation in the book about negative Black stereotypes.
- Glenn Ligon: Untitled (America/Me), The High Line, 18th Street and 10th Avenue, New York, 3 September-November 2024
