Artist, Glenn Ligon: My name is Glenn Ligon and I'm an artist living and working in New York City.
This is a work called Warm Broad Glow. It is a quotation from a novel by Gertrude Stein called Three Lives. And Stein describes a character named Rose, who is a Black woman, quote, “Rose laughed when she was happy, but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine. Rose was never joyous with the earthborn boundless joy of negroes.”
Stein is writing in a moment where characterizations of Black people are generally negative depictions: Black people as lazy, as irresponsible, intellectually deficient, and that Black people are always happy, that they are always smiling. And so Stein trades in those stereotypes. It's not a full picture of Black humanity.
The phrase “negro sunshine,” when I first read it, struck me because of its oddity. “Negro,” “Blackness,” is the absence of light, and sunshine is the presence of all light. So Stein is making this sort of juxtaposition for literary effect. But Black sunshine, Black joy, is an interesting, provocative phrase, given that we live in a country that, for the most part, is anti-Black. And so any expression of Black joy is a kind of resistance.