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[Untitled] (Cancellation Prints)

Contemporary Art

Glenn Ligon is known for his use of stenciled quotations. In 2003 he discovered that one of his earlier print projects, featuring text from author Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” had not been cancelled by the printer. (Cancellation of a series, by marking the plates with an X, ensures that no unauthorized copies of an artist’s work can be made.) For [Untitled] (Cancellation Prints), Ligon himself cancelled the plates by drawing large drypoint Xs over the stenciling—but then authorized an edition from them anyway. As he explained:

Cancelled but present, new but haunted by the ghosts of their earlier meanings, the prints speak to the mutability of questions of racial identity and a shift in the cultural context in which the original works were received.
MEDIUM Hardground, softground, aquatint and spit bite etching with drypoint
DATES 1992-2003
DIMENSIONS Sheet: 28 1/4 x 20 in. (71.8 x 50.8 cm) Image: 24 x 15 3/4 in. (61 x 40 cm)  (show scale)
SIGNATURE Each signed and dated lower right in graphite: "Glen Ligon '03
COLLECTIONS Contemporary Art
ACCESSION NUMBER 2003.60a-b
CREDIT LINE Robert A. Levinson Fund and gift of Dr. and Mrs. Frank L. Babbott, by exchange
CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION Diptych
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
CAPTION Glenn Ligon (American, born 1960). [Untitled] (Cancellation Prints), 1992-2003. Hardground, softground, aquatint and spit bite etching with drypoint, Sheet: 28 1/4 x 20 in. (71.8 x 50.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Robert A. Levinson Fund and gift of Dr. and Mrs. Frank L. Babbott, by exchange, 2003.60a-b. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2003.60b_PS9.jpg)
EDITION Edition: 4/15 Edition of 15 with 5 aps
IMAGE component, 2003.60b_PS9.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2017
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RIGHTS STATEMENT © Glenn Ligon, Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles
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