Product Review

Internationally recognized artist Glenn Ligon explores in a combination artist book and exhibition document the continuing relevance of Steve Reichs early taped speech work, Come Out (1966), in a series of new monumental screen-printed paintings. Echoing Reichs repetitive two-channel work sampling the voice of David Hamm, one of the badly beaten Harlem Six wrongly accused of murdering a shopkeeper, Ligon overlays the words come out to show them on canvas to form densely layered landscapes of text. Like Reichs work in which the intelligibility of the words breaks apart with repetition, Ligons superimposed texts reflect on the shifting effects of a visual continuum. Featured is an essay by film critic Megan Ratner examining the relationship between the paintings, the phrase and the history of the Harlem Six.