Presented by Aspen Art Museum, Break It Down is an exhibition by Glenn Ligon that brings together prints, multiples and works on paper made by the artist since the early 1990s.

For this exhibition, the gallery is divided into three passages, the first of which is anchored by Figure (2001), a sprawling collection of fifty screen-prints featuring grainy, passport-style photos of Ligon’s front and back on coloured paper. These face two influential early sets of prints, Runaways and Narratives (both 1993), which first appeared in Ligon’s landmark exhibition To Disembark at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. With precision and self-awareness, these works provide camouflaged insights into the ironies and transgressions faced by Ligon as a Black artist moving within networks of culture. Runaways consists of ten anonymous characterisations of “Glenn,” a runaway enslaved person. Accented with a dark and knowing humour, the descriptions are in fact written by friends whom Ligon enlisted to characterise him in the style of a missing persons report. Similarly, Narratives moulds Ligon’s experiences into nine stylised preambles that mimic the title pages of propagandistic tales of formerly enslaved individuals.

Ligon incorporates language and text into many of his works and series, examining the ways in which identity and culture are constructed against the backdrop of America’s complex and insidious past. Appropriating writing from a diverse range of sources, including literary passages from authors such as James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Gertrude Stein, and Zora Neale Hurston, Ligon often lays the ground for his works using stencils or templates: clinical tools that belie the intimate, vulnerable, and expressive quality of the chosen text. In discussing his early ventures in printmaking, Ligon remarked, “I am interested in the border between what is mechanical, repetitive, impersonal, and what is autobiographical.” This exhibition inhabits and troubles that border to reveal a chimeric self-portrait of the artist, one comprising photographs, reports, annotations, and stories that resist understanding.

The exhibition is curated by Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator at Aspen Art Museum.

Glenn Ligon
Break It Down

21 November 2025–15 March 2026

Member Opening: Glenn Ligon and Shahryar Nashat
Thursday 20 November, 5–7pm
Exhibition walkthrough with Glenn Ligon and Daniel Merritt, 5.45pm

Aspen Art Museum
637 East Hyman Avenue
Aspen
CO 81611