Glenn Ligon is featured in the 2021 New York Times’ T Magazine The Greats issue.

“In 1996, the artist Glenn Ligon made his first “Stranger in the Village” painting, stenciling fragments of James Baldwin’s 1953 essay on a gessoed canvas with oil stick, black on black: a visual play on Baldwin’s words, the blackness literally hard to read. The essay, one of the writer’s most famous, recounts his experiences at age 27 in the Swiss hamlet of Leukerbad, where he had been staying with his boyfriend while finishing his first novel. “It did not occur to me — possibly because I am an American — that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro,” he writes. The alienation Baldwin evokes is total, the simple racism of the village becoming a lens through which he sees with fresh clarity the more elaborated and systematized version of it back home. “In the beginning, it was not only wanting to be with Baldwin but wanting to be Baldwin,” says Ligon.

“This intense identification with his queerness, with his Blackness, but also his engagement with what it means to live in America. In some ways it’s less about the specifics of the words, because I’d always taken his words and made them abstract.” Now that Ligon is 61 and one of the most celebrated artists of our time, he says it took him this long to be able to confront the text of “Stranger in the Village” in its entirety. Over the years, Ligon has often been asked the question of whether he considers himself “a political artist” — which now seems preposterously naïve in its presumption of a neutral ground. “When I first started showing in the ’90s,” he says, people would say, “‘Oh, your work is about your Black identity.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not a well that you just dip in and drink from.’”

We are pleased to announce that Cecily Brown’s 'There’ll be bluebirds', has sold for £3.5 million to benefit global environmental charity ClientEarth in Christie’s 20th/21st Century Sale in London.

The work was generously donated by Cecily Brown and launches the Artists for ClientEarth series, organised by Gallery Climate Coalition together with Christie’s in support of ClientEarth.

ClientEarth approaches the climate crisis in a unique and systemic way, by using the law to challenge industries, corporations and governments that are involved in the most polluting activities. The GCC and Christie’s have come together with ClientEarth to raise money, awareness and support from the art world for this essential work through the Artists for ClientEarth initiative.

Frieze Masters Talks: Amie Siegel in conversation with Nicholas Cullinan

Dr. Nicholas Cullinan (Director, National Portrait Gallery), will be in conversation with Amie Siegel about her new work Asterisms (2021), and Bloodlines, a work-in-progress, that will premiere in the UK in 2022.

Curated by Cullinan, Frieze Masters Talks provides a platform for leading artists, museum curators, writers and critics to discuss the history of art and its continuing significance in contemporary practice.

The talk will be online and available to Frieze VIPs and members on Sunday 17 October, 3pm BST, and from Monday 18 October to the public,  as part of Frieze's two free weekly article allocation.

Alexandre da Cunha in collaboration with Noel Stewart. 

‘Rio de Janeiro – New York – Lagos – Paris – Moscow – New Delhi – Beijing – Tokyo’, 2021. Unique edition, series of 8

Ahead of his exhibition at Brighton CCA Alexandre da Cunha was commissioned to make a new public art work for the gallery facade in the form of a banner covering the windows. In this work, titled ‘Arch’, da Cunha combined an iconic image of a black stiletto anchored within a concrete fairy cake: symbols of innocence and adulthood, indulgence and luxury, power and celebration.

‘Arch’ was installed from 14 June - 30 July 2021. The work was then taken down and da Cunha collaborated with milliner Noel Stewart to create a series of wearable sculptures made from the fabric of the original banner.

These hats are available to buy from Atelier CCA, with all proceeds going to the artist and supporting the Brighton CCA programme.

‘Michael Landy H.2.N.Y’ - a newly commissioned performance to mark the 25th anniversary of Museum Tinguely. 

Friday, 24 September, 5.45pm CET

Jean Tinguely has been a guiding artistic figure for Michael Landy ever since Landy saw the 1982 Tate exhibition of the Swiss sculptor as a nineteen year-old student.

In 2006 Landy produced a series of drawings and paintings from photographs of Jean Tinguely's ‘Homage to New York’, a 23 feet long and 27 feet high "self-constructing and self-destroying" sculpture-machine that self combusted in front of a live audience on the evening of March 17, 1960 in the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden. Landy also began to research a possible re-enactment of ‘Homage’, re-constructing some parts of it, and creating a documentary about the work.

Now, on the occasion of Museum Tinguely's 25th birthday, Landy presents his re-imagining of the original ‘Homage to New York’, with dancers and a choreography developed in collaboration with Tabea Martin.

Kaserne Basel, Klybeckstr. 1b, CH-4057 Basel

Tonight, Amie Siegel will be in conversation with Filipa Ramos as part
of Art Basel Film.

Live Q&A: 7pm CET
Monday, 20 September
Stadt Kino, 5 Klostergasse, Basel

The conversation will be followed by a screening of three of Siegel’s recent works. Exhibited exclusively as installations and rarely seen in the cinema, these works trace the back stories of various underlying references, materials, and objects.

‘Quarry’ (2015) follows the journey of marble from the largest underground quarry in the world, in Vermont, to luxury developments in Manhattan.

Filmed at the Freud Museum in London ‘Fetish’ (2016) renders the annual nocturnal cleaning of Sigmund Freud's collection of archaeological artefacts, bringing together its intimate operations and the psychoanalytic process, both occurring behind closed doors.

‘Genealogies’ (2016) gathers novels, films, images, advertising, and soundtrack into a baroque invocation of image and artwork provenance, remake and copy. Extending from Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mepris’, to Freud, Pink Floyd, and the Beastie Boys, the video drafts a non-hierarchical lineage of adaptation, appropriation, and recurrence.

 ‘Quarry’, 2015, 34:00 min. HD video, colour, sound

 ‘Fetish’, 2016, 10:00 min. HD video, colour, sound

 ‘Genealogies’, 2016, 26:00 min. HD video, colour, sound

 Total running time: 70 minutes.

Thomas Dane Gallery at Art Basel
Stand: R17

Showing works by Lynda Benglis, Cecily Brown, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Patricia Leite, Albert Oehlen, Dana Schutz, Amie Siegel and Caragh Thuring.

Preview: 20 - 23 September
Public days: 24 - 26 September

This evening, Barbara Kasten and David Levinthal will be in conversation as part of Photo London 2021.

The talk, moderated by William A. Ewing, will focus on the art, technology, industry and commerce of the Polaroid.

Tuesday 14 September, 2021 at 8pm GMT

Hurvin Anderson: ‘Reverb’

Exhibition dates: 12 October - 4 December 2021

Thomas Dane Gallery 

3 & 11 Duke Street, St James's London, SW1