Glenn Ligon

Sourced from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the post–Civil Rights-era images that filled these coloring books were created as tools for teaching children the visual vocabulary of Black pride and self-representation. Ligon, however, removed the historical context, reproducing them as simple coloring sheets to share with the children in his workshops as an invitation to draw unencumbered. Initially attempting to replicate their spontaneous marks precisely at scale, Ligon soon discovered that the children’s wonderfully unguarded gestures could not be replicated. He reinterpreted their drawings, preserving each child’s palette and composition while allowing his own hand to improvise, translating young, unfettered gestures into deliberate marks.

Across his Coloring Book canvases, Ligon isolates and recombines imagery—suns, alphabet letters, street scenes—with portraits of such historical Black figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X. Multiple versions of paintings come from the same template: marks pile up in dense thickets of pigment in some works while just a few strategically placed blooms of color are enough to animate a face in others. While Ligon’s tactic of repeated templates recalls the mass production of the original educational coloring books, each painting takes on its own meaning. The children’s instinctive, unselfconscious marks combined with Ligon’s considered, conceptually informed interventions render layers of meaning and association and invite multiple interpretations. In ‘Malcolm X, Sun, Frederick Douglass, Boy with Bubbles (Version 3) #2’ (2001), both of the titular historical figures appear with rouged cheeks, a detail taken directly from one child’s drawing. Ligon’s color application recalls the stylized make-up of Andy Warhol’s Mao paintings. But where Warhol drew parallels between propaganda and consumer culture, Ligon foregrounds education’s role in constructing identity and reinforcing stereotypes. Both playful and unsettling, the Coloring Book paintings expose how elusive representation can be, hinging on the tension between children’s untutored imagination and the historically informed perspective only an adult can bear. This friction squares with Ligon’s broader interest in abstraction and legibility, typifying his approach to stripping legibility not to obscure meaning but to enable its multiplicities to surface.