Glenn Ligon: Self Portrait at Nine Years Old

Pigmented cotton base sheet with stenciled linen pulp painting.
12× inches.
Courtesy the artist and Dieu Donne

Self Portrait at Nine Years Old is the second in a series of work which explores how notions of the self are formed by images from popular culture. Ligon’s stenciled paper pulp “self-portrait” is actually an image of James Brown, a pop singer whom the artist idolized when he was a child. The artist has said about the series, “Remember when you loved a pop star so much that you wanted to look like them, sing like them, be like them? That’s what these self portraits are about.”