(New York, 1960- )
Lives and works in Boston

This work was created as part of a group of works for a 2001 exhibition titled 'Colored,' a title that references not just how the works were made, but their racial dimensions as well. For this project, Ligon copied figures from 1960's and 1970's era African American coloring books and gave them out to school children, inviting them to 'color' these figures. The resulting children’s images became sources from which Ligon then painted in monumental scale 'colored' portraits of Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass and other great black figures. These paintings work on many levels, but for Ligon, it was significant that to pre-school age children, notions of race, identity and politics are not yet fixed. The children’s decisions regarding which figures to color, and how to color them was based solely on whim. A central theme of these works is freedom, the freedom the children themselves bring to race and identity. As Ligon has said,

They are about breaking free of constraints by using children's drawings and using their casual, indifferent relationship to the images and the whole project of liberation those images were about in the first place. The paintings are hovering in that space between meaning a great deal and meaning nothing.