MASON CITY – The Charles H. MacNider Art Museum is pleased to announce the acquisition of a new artwork by contemporary artist Glenn Ligon. The piece was purchase with funds from the John and Mary Pappajohn Endowment Fund with money dedicated specifically to prints.
The new artwork, titled Dispatches, was created in 2011. It is an aquatint with spit-bite and drypoint. The piece is made up of four separately framed prints that together comprise the completed piece.
“Ligon’s paintings and sculptures examine cultural and social identity through found sources—literature, Afrocentric coloring books, photographs—to reveal the ways in which the history of slavery, the civil rights movement, and sexual politics inform our understanding of American society.” (www.pbs.org/art21/artists/glenn-ligon)
Artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) lives and works in New York. Ligon received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1982. He has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Power Plant in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the ICA in Philadelphia, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the Kunstverein Munich. A mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, titled Glenn Ligon: America, was organized by Scott Rothkopf and opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2011. It traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Selected public collections that own an artwork by Ligon include the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and now the Charles H. MacNider Art Museum.
The Charles H. MacNider Art Museum is free and open to the public.
