In Conversation: Glenn Ligon, Dr. Kellie Jones & Julie Mehretu with readings by Helga Davis

About Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1960. He graduated with a BA from Wesleyan University in 1982 and participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1985. His early paintings were largely abstract; he began adding language to them during the mid-1980s in order to explore questions around race, identity, and history. In the text-based works for which he is best known, Ligon looks to prominent writers and cultural figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, and Richard Pryor for source material. In addition to making paintings, works on paper, and prints, he began creating neons in 2005, incorporating a sculptural component into his practice. His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997, 2015), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2019), and Documenta XI (2002). In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented America, a comprehensive midcareer retrospective organized by Scott Rothkopf. Recent painting series include Debris Field and Static, which see Ligon move increasingly toward abstraction and varying degrees of legibility to reflect on the instability and limits of language in a “post-truth” world. He is also deeply engaged with the work of other artists and undertakes curatorial projects such as Blue Black at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis, Missouri (2017), and Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England (2024). Ligon lives and works in New York.

About Dr. Kellie Jones 
Dr. Kellie Jones is Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History & Archaeology, and a Professor in the Department African American & African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.

Dr. Jones is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) and the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia), and holds an honorary Doctorate from The Courtauld in London. She is a recipient of a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award from Columbia University. She has also received awards from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University; The College Art Association; and Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. She was the inaugural recipient of the High Museum’s, David C. Driskell Prize, in 2005. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Dr. Jones’s writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals. She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017), which received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award in 2018 and was named a Best Book of the Decade in 2019 by ArtNews, Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times and a Best Book of 2017 in Artforum. Her latest book October Files: David Hammons is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2025. 

Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit. Her exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was co-curator of “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s” (Brooklyn Museum), named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum.

About Julie Mehretu
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970, Julie Mehretu is a world renowned painter who lives and works in New York City. Mehretu’s practice in painting, drawing and printmaking engage us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space by exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern day phenomenology of the social.

Mehretu received a Master's of Fine Art with honors from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. She is a recipient of many awards, including the The MacArthur Award (2005), the Berlin Prize: Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship at The American Academy in Berlin, Germany (2007) and in 2015 she was awarded the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award. Named TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2020, Mehretu also designed BMW 20th Art Car this year, in 2024.

A mid-career survey of Mehretu's work recently toured at LACMA (Los Angeles), High Museum (Atlanta) The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and The Walker Museum of Art (Minneapolis) from 2019 - 2023. Her largest European solo exhibition to date entitled, Ensemble, opened March 17, 2024 at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Mehretu is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The National Academy of Design. Her global representative is Marian Goodman Gallery.

About Helga Davis 
Harlem native Helga Davis is a multifaceted, critically acclaimed artist, curator and cultural convener widely respected for her expansive practice. Helga was a principal performer in the 25th anniversary revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's Einstein On The Beach; in Robert Wilson and Berniece Johnson Reagon’s The Temptation of St. Anthony; Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower; and in Courtney Bryan’s Yet Unheard, among many others. Her eponymously named New York Public Radio podcast, Helga, now in its sixth season, unfolds as a long-form conversation wherein she engages artists of all disciplines to explore current cultural issues with rare candor.  As a curator, she has made performances at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and recently completed a three-year position as the Visiting Curator for the Performing Arts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 

In 2019, she was a finalist for the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and was awarded the Greenfield Prize in Composition. Between 2019-2022, she was a Creative Futures Fellow at UNC, Chapel Hill, a creative residency funded by the Mellon Foundation. She’s an inaugural advisor to the Brown University Arts Institute, working with the leadership team on curatorial and programming initiatives. She is a Teaching Artist/Mentor for The Park Avenue Armory Youth Corps. In Spring 2023, she  was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation to write a work for children’s choir and orchestra, featuring herself as soloist and conductor.  She serves on the Board of the Jerome Foundation.

About The Great Hall of The Cooper Union
The Great Hall of The Cooper Union, located in The Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, has stood for more than a century as a bastion of free speech and a witness to the flow of American history and ideas. When the hall opened in 1858, more than a year in advance of the completion of the institution, it quickly became a destination for all interested in serious discussion and debate of the vital issues of the day.

The Great Hall was the platform for some of the earliest workers' rights campaigns and for the birth of the NAACP, the women's suffrage movement and the American Red Cross. To the Great Hall's lectern has come a pageant of famous Americans — rebels and reformers, poets and presidents. Before they were elected, Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama all spoke there. Besides Woodrow Wilson, two other incumbent presidents have spoken in the Great Hall: William Jefferson Clinton, who, on May 12, 1993, delivered a major economic address on reducing the federal deficit and Barack Obama, who, on April 22, 2010, gave an important speech on economic regulation and the financial markets.

During the past century's times of tremendous upheaval, it was through meetings in Cooper's famous auditorium that the politics and legislation necessary to build a humane city took shape.