Ligon’s latest work, Aftermath, spells out ‘November 4, 2020’ in neon, the day after Donald Trump was voted out of office. Yet lest anyone think the election result was a win for antiracism, Ligon noted in Artforum that ‘the emergency started generations ago for Indigenous people who resided here before the colonizers arrived, and for the enslaved Africans brought to these shores over four hundred years ago’. Ligon has become the go-to chronicler of America in crisis, producing sculpture, painting and writing on Black history, the African-American experience and racial injustice. As the Black Lives Matter protests swept the world, images of his art proliferated on social media (including in posts by several museums, which Ligon criticised for not having asked permission). As well as participating in a dozen group shows, Ligon has been a curatorial adviser for Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (due to open at the New Museum in January), an exhibition conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor and realised posthumously. And, when a doomed exhibition of work by Philip Guston’s art needed contextualising, Ligon was the go-to writer.

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