Glenn Ligon was born on April 20, 1960, in the Bronx, New York. After attending the Rhode Island School of Design for two years beginning in 1980, he received a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1982. In 1985, he participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. Combining painting, photography, and conceptual practices, Ligon has addressed issues of racial and sexual identity in his work. He first attracted recognition for his paintings in which texts are written in black against white backgrounds, such as Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) (1990–91). In Notes on the Margin of the "Black Book" (1991–93), Ligon juxtaposed reproductions of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographic images of black men with his own textual critiques of the images. His Stranger in the Village paintings (2000) use coal dust to lend a racial signification to seemingly abstract paintings. For his Colored series (2000), the artist asked children to color pages from Black Pride–themed coloring books of the 1970s and then silkscreened the results onto large canvases. Annotations (2003), Ligon's first web-based project, expands on his earlier works about family photo albums, such as A Feast of Scraps (1994–98); in this later work, ambiguously assembled photographs of the kind one would find in a family album—group photographs from dinner parties, studio portraits, informal snapshots taken in living rooms—are linked to texts, other photographs, and audio clips to explore the creation of personal and familial histories.

Ligon has had solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (1993), Brooklyn Museum of Art (1996), Saint Louis Art Museum (2000), the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001), and Dia Center for the Arts in New York (2003), among other venues. Group shows in which he has participated include the Whitney Biennial (1991 and 1993), Biennale of Sydney (1996), Venice Biennale (1997), Kwangju Biennale (2000), Documenta (2002), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003), and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self at the International Center of Photography in New York (2003). He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982, 1989, and 1991), Art Matters (1990), the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1997), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003). He lives and works in New York.