Distinguishing Piss from Rain: Writings and Interviews

The collected writings and interviews of Glenn Ligon, gathered across more than twenty years of a practice built on text and on Black literary voices.

The volume brings together essays and interviews from the early 2000s onward, edited by James Hoff with an introduction by T. Jean Lax. Ligon writes on contemporary and historical artists, among them Philip Guston, David Hammons and Andy Warhol, and the book places Black identity at the centre of art institutions that have mostly been white. It runs to about 400 pages with 80 colour and 20 black-and-white reproductions, and was published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in 2024.

Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx in 1960 and moved from abstract painting to text-based paintings, installations and neons. His work repeatedly quotes James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and other Black writers. It is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Baltimore Museum of Art.