Foundation News
Open House Sundays
June 12th, 2016
Open House Sundays at The Brant Foundation
1-3pm on the following dates:
June 12th, 19th, 26th
July 10th, 17th
August 28th
September 4th, 11th
On view:
Jonathan Horowitz: Occupy Greenwich
Parking for The Brant Foundation’s open house Sundays will be located at Greenwich Polo Club. A designated parking area will be on your immediate left before Greenwich Polo check-in. If you wish to stay for the polo match please proceed to Greenwich Polo check-in to purchase a ticket. You may also purchase a discounted ticket online at: greenwichpolo.com.
Please contact us with any questions: 203-869-0611 or info@brantfoundation.org
About Occupy Greenwich:
Opening amid the presidential election season, the exhibition is comprised mostly of work made over the course of Barack Obama’s eight-year presidency. As such, the exhibition presents a timely opportunity to examine Horowitz’s ever-evolving practice within the context of the current political landscape.
Since the early 1990s, Horowitz has created work that combines the imagery and ambivalence of Pop Art with the engaged criticality of conceptualism. His work in video, sculpture, painting and photography examines the deep-seated links between consumerism and political consciousness, as well as the political silences of postwar art. Recent painting projects have explored the personal psychology of mark making, at times prominently employing the hands of others. Appropriation of both pop cultural and art historical sources figures heavily in the show, with imagery transformed through both technology and the human hand.
Anchoring the exhibition is the installation November 4, 2008, which re-stages the day eight years ago when Obama was elected president. In the piece, 19 hours of CNN and Fox News coverage (originally presented as live feeds) play on back-to-back monitors in the center of a room. Red and blue carpets divide the space into opposing sides and 42 official presidential portraits circle the room, with Obama’s portrait in waiting on the floor.
Upon arrival at the Foundation, viewers are confronted by a functional solar panel sculpture on the lawn, which powers Horowitz’s video Apocalypto Now inside. Using found footage, the film weaves narratives on the history of the Hollywood disaster movie, climate change, terrorism, and the Christian apocalypse. In another room, a human scale, bronze statue of Hillary Clinton greets visitors. Rendered in the style of a 1970’s greeting card figurine, the sculpture is captioned “Hillary Clinton is a Person Too,” evoking Clinton’s vilification as both a political leader and a powerful woman.
Notwithstanding its political undertones, viewer participation and social interaction are recurring tenets of Horowitz’s work. A sculptural installation titled Free Store invites viewers to leave objects that they wish to discard and take away whatever they would like. Another work, Contribution Cubes, is a series of Plexiglas donation boxes each dedicated to a different charitable or political organization. Suggesting minimalist sculpture and relational aesthetics, the work describes the population that passes through the exhibition space through the varying donation amounts that accumulate. 402 Dots, the first of Horowitz’s Dot Paintings, is a monumentally scaled work comprised of 402 canvases, each painted by a different person. Participants in the project were instructed to paint a perfect, solid black dot with an 8-inch diameter in the center of a 12-inch square canvas, using only provided paint and brushes. The resulting dots all differ in size, shape, position, and texture. The paintings are hung in a brick pattern, suggesting a blown-up field of irregular Ben-Day dots. Like a vast population, together they create a paean to human struggle, acceptance, and individuality.
Current Exhibition
Glenn Ligon
New York May 21st to July 19th, 2025
Free Admission · Walk-Ins Welcome
PRESS RELEASE: The Brant Foundation Art Study Center is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by American artist Glenn Ligon. Glenn Ligon features video, neon installations, and paintings by the artist, whose practice reconsiders American history through engagements with the written word. Opening to the public on May 21st, the exhibition will be on view throughout the foundation’s East Village space.
“We are honored to present a selection of Glenn Ligon’s works, many of which were also shown in Camden Art Centre’s 2014 exhibition Call and Response,” said The Brant Foundation’s founder, Peter M. Brant. “Ligon has been one of the most impactful and influential artists over multiple generations. His work deals with sensitive political and racial issues that transform our history into the current reality while delivering a beautiful, minimal yet abstract aesthetic characteristic of his distinct personal style.”
Glenn Ligon (American, b. 1960) has pursued a deep confrontation with American culture throughout his career. Drawing from a variety of sources—the texts of literary greats James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy, and Steve Reich’s minimalist musical compositions, to name a few—Ligon’s work addresses the failures of representation in the American zeitgeist. He brings important cultural moments and artifacts into a broader, contemporary context. For instance, in Untitled (Bruise/Blues), Ligon draws from the recorded testimony of Daniel Hamm, one of six Black teenagers wrongfully incarcerated during the Harlem riots of 1964. The works take as their point of departure Hamm’s description of the police beatings he endured, even incorporating Hamm’s slip of tongue (bruise vs. blues) in Ligon’s sculptural neon reproduction.
Through multiple works, Ligon demonstrates how a legacy of representation complicates and confounds constructions of race, masculinity, identity and the nation itself. On the Foundation’s second floor, viewers encounter Ligon’s Rückenfigur (2009). The neon installation takes its name from the German art historical term Rückenfigur, which describes landscape painting that includes a figure seen from behind. The word “AMERICA” is illuminated in neon, yet something is off; a closer look reveals the text is facing away from the viewer and into the wall. This directional exclusion seems to remove the viewer from the artwork. In doing so, Rückenfigur suggests a culture and nation that has literally turned its back on its viewers.
About Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon received a bachelor of arts from Wesleyan University and attended the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2011, the Whitney held a mid-career retrospective, Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Ligon’s work has been shown in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennale (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2019, 2011), and Documenta 11 (2002). His solo exhibition and curatorial project All Over the Place recently concluded at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, England.