{"id":37965,"date":"2015-10-19T07:48:29","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T11:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.missrosen.com\/?p=37965"},"modified":"2015-10-19T07:48:29","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T11:48:29","slug":"glenn-ligon-a-people-on-the-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.missrosen.com\/glenn-ligon-a-people-on-the-cover\/","title":{"rendered":"Glenn Ligon: A People on the Cover"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lorrie<\/a>

Lorrie Davis with Rachel Gallagher, Letting Down My Hair: Two Years with the Love Rock Tribe \u2013 From Dawning to Downing of Aquarius. Published by Arthur Fields Books, New York, 1973.<\/p><\/div>\n

While doing a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, artist Glenn Ligon began collaborating with the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota. Without a clear plan for the partnership, Ligon began wandering the stacks, perusing their holdings, and looking at books he randomly pulled off the shelves. As he did so he discovered the project he would create, the telling of the history of black people in the United States as represented on the covers of books. The result is an intimate white paperback quietly titled A People on the Cover<\/a> (Ridinghouse).<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

The book begins with an introduction by Ligon, in which he recounts a brief history of his readings from 1960-1978. He begins with the formative memory of the day a white man came to his South Bronx home, going door-to-door trying to sell the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the housing projects. Ligon\u2019s mother, who worked as a nurse\u2019s aide at a psychiatric hospital, purchased that set of books that was the equivalent of almost an entire month\u2019s rent, believing that education was the best way to get her children out of the hood.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Ligon, who was subsequently transferred to a private school, remembers the way that books became status symbols of white culture, and reinforced their ideals, and found himself in a precarious position of being a young teenage boy living in two worlds. In his earlier years, he recounts an interest in the pretenses of white culture, but grew out of that pose on his first trip to the Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village. He spotted James Baldwin\u2019s The Fire Next Time<\/em> in the store window, and became transfixed by the red, black, and orange cover of the book. As Ligon writes, \u201cI felt, in that moment, that in those four words on the cover, I had found myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Read the Full Story at Crave Online<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While doing a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, artist Glenn Ligon began collaborating with the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota. Without a clear plan for the partnership, Ligon began wandering the stacks, perusing their holdings, and looking at books he randomly pulled off the shelves. As he did so he discovered the project he would create, the telling of the history of black people in the United States as represented on the covers of books. The result is an intimate white paperback quietly titled A People on the Cover (Ridinghouse). . The book begins with an introduction by Ligon, in which he recounts a brief history of his readings from 1960-1978. He begins with the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[363,18,19,20,2,4,38,2719],"tags":[2984,2990,2993,2986,2983,696,2265,2989,2987,514,2988,2985,2992],"class_list":["post-37965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1960s","category-1970s","category-1980s","category-1990s","category-art","category-books","category-bronx","category-crave","tag-a-people-on-the-cover","tag-arthur-fields-books","tag-eighth-street-bookshop","tag-encyclopaedia-britannica","tag-glenn-ligon","tag-greenwich-village","tag-james-baldwin","tag-letting-down-my-hair-two-years-with-the-love-rock-tribe-from-dawning-to-downing-of-aquarius","tag-lorrie-davis","tag-new-york","tag-rachel-gallagher","tag-ridinghouse","tag-the-fire-next-time"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nGlenn Ligon: A People on the Cover - Miss Rosen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.missrosen.com\/glenn-ligon-a-people-on-the-cover\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Glenn Ligon: A People on the Cover - Miss Rosen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"While doing a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, artist Glenn Ligon began collaborating with the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota. 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