By CAROL VOGEL
A STARTLING sight will soon be hanging in midair in the Madison Avenue window of the Whitney Museum of American Art, just a few blocks from Ralph Lauren, Prada and Gucci: a 22-foot-long neon sign spelling out the words “negro sunshine.” It’s the work of the New York Conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, whose midcareer retrospective, “Glenn Ligon: America,” opens at the Whitney on March 10. Taken from “Melanctha,” a 1909 novella by Gertrude Stein about a mixed-race woman, “negro sunshine” is the kind of ambiguous phrase that Mr. Ligon, who is black, uses to speak of the history of African-Americans. “I find her language fascinating,” he said of Stein. “It’s a phrase that stuck in my head.” Are those two words, installed in such a prominent manner, meant to shock? “Shock,” repeated Mr. Ligon, a bit surprised at the question. “It’s not provocative, it’s Gertrude Stein."
“Even my Richard Pryor paintings,” he went on, referring to a series of work based on jokes told by that black comedian, use a common racial epithet. “Turn on the radio,” he said. “A word like that is so archaic, it’s not of this time. It’s about language.”...[continued]
