July 12, 2017

Text: Athena Waligore

Ellsworth Kelly Inspires Glenn Ligon’s Blue Black Exhibition

Glenn Ligon didn’t know Ellsworth Kelly, but an encounter with Kelly’s 28-foot-high painted-aluminum wall sculpture Blue Black, which dominates the atrium of Tadao Ando Architect & Associates’s building for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, inspired Ligon to curate an exhibition there, likewise named “Blue Black.” Kelly’s sculpture explores a multiplicity of meanings of the two colors—particularly apt since color, as in race, is a primary concern in Ligon’s own paintings. Among the 50-plus pieces on view June 9 to October 7 are Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina’s side-by-side inkjets on linen and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil on canvas.

Glenn Ligon’s exhibition “Blue Black.” Photography courtesy of Wade Guyton, Stephen Prina, and Petzel, New York NY.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Corvi-Mora, London.
Blue Black by Ellsworth Kelly. Photography courtesy of Robert Pettus/The Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

> See more from the May 2017 issue of Interior Design
 

               

               

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