Late at night, early in the morning, at noon

<p>'Late at night, early in the morning, at noon' is a two-part exhibition of new and historic works on paper by Glenn Ligon. This presentation extends the artist's longstanding engagement with language and abstraction through a series of richly layered compositions that meditate on the color blue and its emotional, historical and cultural inflections. In dialogue with the writings of James Baldwin, Ligon's latest work here traverses the space between legibility and sensation, where text dissolves into atmosphere and meaning into light. The exhibition's title is taken from Baldwin's 1964 introduction to a Beauford Delaney exhibition in Paris and recalls the writer's reflection on a window through which 'everything one saw… was filtered through leaves.' Ligon draws upon Baldwin's description of light 'as blue as the blues when the last light of sun departed,' to consider how color and language can merge to create a kind of figuration. In these new works, blue operates as more than a color; it conveys mood, time and emotion. It evokes the twilight hour between visibility and darkness; it conjures the emotional register of Blues music. For Ligon, as for Baldwin, light becomes a metaphor for perception itself, a means of reckoning with history, intimacy and the power of art to reveal quieter truths.</p>