GLENN LIGON: Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against The Door

Isaac Hayes, Icicle, George Washington Carver, Graduating Girl #2, 2001

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against The Door, an exhibition of Glenn Ligon’s Coloring Book paintings in Minneapolis.

September 30, 2026 — January 17, 2027

Sourced from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the post–Civil Rights-era images that filled these coloring books were created as tools for teaching children the visual vocabulary of Black pride and self-representation. Ligon, however, removed the historical context, reproducing them as simple coloring sheets to share with the children in his workshops as an invitation to draw unencumbered.

Initially attempting to replicate their spontaneous marks precisely at scale, Ligon soon discovered that the children’s wonderfully unguarded gestures could not be replicated. He reinterpreted their drawings, preserving each child’s palette and composition while allowing his own hand to improvise, translating young, unfettered gestures into deliberate marks.

Malcolm X, Sun, Frederick Douglass, Boy with Bubbles (Version 3) #2, 2001

Across his Coloring Book canvases, Ligon isolates and recombines imagery—suns, alphabet letters, street scenes—with portraits of such historical Black figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X. Multiple versions of paintings come from the same template: marks pile up in dense thickets of pigment in some works while just a few strategically placed blooms of color are enough to animate a face in others. While Ligon’s tactic of repeated templates recalls the mass production of the original educational coloring books, each painting takes on its own meaning.

Throughout ‘Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against The Door,’ Ligon returns to existing historical images as material that can be revisited, reinterpreted and transformed, accruing new significance as the context changes.