Small Malcolm, 2006

Gift of the Artist Private Collection, Calgary

Lauri Firstenberg, 'Neo-Archival and Textual Modes of Production: An Interview with Glenn Ligon,' "Art Journal", Spring 2001, page 47

Born in 1960, the American artist Glenn Ligon combines painting, photography, printmaking and conceptual practices to address issues of racial and sexual identity in his work. In a 2001 interview, Ligon described the Colouring Book project: “I was interested in expanding the range of material that I was using for my paintings to include more image-based source material. Black-themed coloring books from the seventies fascinated me because they were so clearly linked with the project of Black liberation. Any depiction of a Black person, from Malcolm X to a boy swinging on a tire, was a little revolution because it meant that our histories, stories, images and heroes mattered. But our relationship to all that material is quite different now and I wanted to think about that historical distance and issues of engagement and indifference.” The Colouring Book series was a project executed by the artist during a residency at the Walker Art Center in 2000. Ligon wanted to see the reactions of the children who were given these Afrocentric colouring books from the 1960s and 1970s. After all, the figures depicted were largely unknown to them. In "Small Malcolm", the African American civil rights leader has been turned into a clown-like figure with pink lips, rosy cheeks and white hair. Ligon transforms images and words through reproduction and repetition, which became intrinsic to his practice. Despite the repeated image of Malcolm X remaining the same, he is transformed, as each coloured work was created by a different hand, thus becoming a unique work of art. As Ligon explained: “I decided to give the coloring book images to kids from three to nine years old, from all backgrounds, to color on them, then I made paintings based on their drawings. In essence, I commissioned my own source material.”