Detail

Gift of Charlotte and Alan Artus

This screenprint was made for Camden Arts Centre in conjunction with Ligon’s 2014-15 exhibition "Call and Response," which presented a series of paintings based on the 1966 seminal taped-speech work "Come Out" by Minimalist composer Steve Reich. "Come Out" draws on the testimony of six Black youths – Wallace Baker, William Craig, Robert Felder, Donald Hamm, Robert Rice, and Walter Thomas – arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Race Riot of 1964. Known as the “Harlem Six,” they were put on trial in 1965 in a case that galvanized civil rights activists for a generation and raised awareness of police brutality against Black citizens—a persistent issue once again brought to light by the recent police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rashard Brooks, among others.

Ligon uses Reich’s overlapping repetition of words and phrases, resulting in a distortion of the text. The piece alludes to the tactics the police used to coerce and intimidate the six youths into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit.

Bibliography

Carey-Kent, Paul. "Glenn Ligon." Border Crossings Mar 2015: 111-3. ProQuest. Web. 30 June 2020 .

Rachel Spence. Glenn Ligon Interview. The Financial Times Limited, Oct. 2014.

Tani, Ellen Y. “‘Come Out to Show Them’: Speech and Ambivalence in the Work of Steve Reich and Glenn Ligon.” Art Journal, vol. 78, no. 4, Winter 2019, pp. 24–37. EBSCOhost.

Vallee, Mickey. “The Rhythm of Echoes and Echoes of Violence.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 34, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 97–114.