Artist Talk: Glenn Ligon and Stephen Andrews with curator Wanda Nanibush

Glenn Ligon and Stephen Andrews will be in conversation with curator Wanda Nanibush about their twenty year friendship and collaboration with Counterpublic.

Throughout his career, Glenn Ligon has explored American history, literature, and culture with artworks that critically engage the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. For Counterpublic, Ligon presents a curving brick sculpture overlooking the Mississippi River. Visible on the surface of individual bricks are the fingerprints of St. Louisans from Sumner and Vashon High Schools and those of residents from the Homer G. Phillips Senior Apartments. Historically, the imprints of hands and fingers on bricks were the physical traces of the enslaved men, women, and children who turned wet bricks by hand during their weeks-long drying process. Ligon’s sculpture honors the undocumented Black labor that built this country and the hands that will shape its future.

Stephen Andrews’s work engages memory, identity, and technology across photography, drawing, animation, painting, and ceramics. The bow in the cloud is a large tapestry composed from a digital image. The image combines video stills of the May 2025 St. Louis tornado—abstracted into a shortened vortex—with a rainbow that appeared over the city. Inspired by rainbow photographs shared online after the storm, Andrews understands the rainbow as a symbol of hope. Suspended in the form of a Fibonacci spiral, the textile invites viewers to walk around and into it, creating a pathway of discovery shaped by chance. The tapestry includes a timeline that moves from the past on the left to a future that is still unfolding. For Andrews, weather serves as an analogy for the capricious nature of life. Deeply impacted by his own experiences with HIV/AIDS, Andrews understands that life, like the weather, can change everything in the blink of an eye.

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe Independent curator, image and word warrior, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, Canada. Based in Toronto, Nanibush is the founding director of aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of Indigenous curators, writers and artists that last took place at Venice Biennale. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book Moving the Museum which chronicles some of her groundbreaking work at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the Inaugural curator of Indigenous Art. She has curated survey, group, and retrospective exhibitions including: Robert Houle Red is Beautiful (NMAI, Smithsonian, Washington); Rebecca Belmore, Facing the Monumental (2019), (Canada and the U.S) and Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971 – 1989 (AGO). She received her M.A. in Visual Studies from University of Toronto where she has also taught graduate courses. She will be the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY in the Graduate Department of Art History in 2025. Nanibush has published widely on Indigenous art, politics, history, feminism and sexuality.