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Emily Fisher Landau was, simply put, one of the greatest collectors and patrons of the twentieth century. Her legacy is set apart for her deep and longstanding involvement with leading institutions, in particular the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as her profound engagement with the art and artists of her time and her unerring instinct as a collector at the highest level. Fisher Landau assembled one of the greatest collections of modern and contemporary art – over 100 works of which are coming to auction at Sotheby’s on 8–9 November.
Join us over the next 20 days leading up to the Emily Fisher Landau Evening Auction on 8 November as our specialists spotlight 20 key works from the Collection, celebrating their impact on twentieth-century art. Here, Lucius Elliot reflects on the significance of Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (I Lost My Voice I Found My Voice) (1991) as part of our series The Emily Fisher Landau Collection: Twentieth Century Art in Twenty Unforgettable Works.
Ligon’s Doors represented a groundbreaking moment in contemporary artistic production, and Untitled (I Lost My Voice I Found My Voice) from 1991 stands as one of the very best examples from the series. It serves as an extraordinary monument to the existential powers of looking: at art, at society and ultimately, reflexively, at ourselves. As the text progresses and repeats, looping infinitely into a scream of defiance, its legibility diminishes, an infinite regression of senseless violence and persecution becoming more and more meaningless and incomprehensible.
Acquired by Emily Fisher Landau in the year of its execution and remaining in her collection ever since, the work’s appearance at auction is a landmark event, and the first time in nearly a decade that a work from the series has come for public sale.
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Untitled (I Lost My Voice I Found My Voice) stands as a fervent monument to the Black American fight for visibility, a poignant visual metaphor for the fragmented experience and representation of both the Black individual and artist in the United States. Drawing on rhetorical passages from writers who negotiated the prospects of Blackness in an oppressively white America, including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, Ligon fuses radically abstracted text with symbolic poeticism.
Here, the alternating repetition of “I LOST MY VOICE” and “I FOUND MY VOICE” evokes the poetic semantic devices Martin Luther King, Jr. employed in the iconic speech he delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, “I Have a Dream.”
In his “Door” series, Ligon both underscores and destabilizes societal myths attached to Blackness and being, and the conceptual foundations of these earlier paintings would remain a touchstone throughout his practice. The series was conceived when Ligon, in 1990, was moving a discarded door in his downtown Manhattan studio and realized its weight and solidity rendered it the ideal support. Its dimensions further made it a perfectly scaled referent to the human body for texts that speak in the first person about the body and the self.
Layering black oil stick on a gessoed wood panel, Ligon creates claustrophobic channels of formulaically stenciled letters. He eschews the words’ complete legibility and denies them their full semantic capacities as the voices of protest that they would otherwise communicate, formally capturing the contradictions of existence. Just as James Baldwin reflected on how Americans have made “an abstraction of the Negro,” here the increasing illegibility of Ligon’s chosen phrase creates an overall abstraction in relief.
The anthropomorphic scale of the painting creates the conditions for a profound yet dizzying experience which harnesses the disquieting racial undertones of Ligon’s work, yet the message’s content acts as a triumphant reclamation of a fraught and violent history.
Of the rare and limited series of works known as “Door Paintings,” Untitled (I Lost My Voice I Found My Voice) is distinguished for its inclusion in one of Ligon’s most important traveling retrospectives, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and comparable examples of the Door series are held in such esteemed museum collections as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, among others.
