Glenn Ligon at the Whitney

Glenn Ligon takes appropriated materials of slave posters and Mapplethrope's Black Book, and tries insert his own narrative into it.

I liked the show, and I didn't. I think identity is good and you should try to work with your identity and actually keeping a fixed identity makes everyone way more comfortable, but at the same time I feel like it boxes you in. Who does the boxing in? Do I? Probably.
I felt like I wanted to have discussion with every black gallery guard and be like, are you gay? How does this work make you feel? I felt a type of discomfort, I hadn't felt since high school when I went past gay sex shops on Christopher Street. Now, to me at least, gayness doesn't feel especially threatening, but blackness still does, just because there is still so much inequality in this country and in the world, so much of it is tied to skin color and for those of us that have climbed onto more even ground all that disconnect is still yawning like black hole waiting swallow individuals up into proscribed roles of oppressed and oppressor.Looking at people flitting through the gallery, at least I didn't feel like I was the only one.

I said in a later discussion that I thought that the writing in Mapplethrope's Black Book
was like putting articles into Playboy, making you read things when you didn't really
want to read, you just wanted to be stimulated. I guess the end point of Ligon's work would be that it still matters but not in a threatening way. I wonder what society will look like then. Anyway, it's exciting to think about.