the former Public Tobacco Factory in Athens, Greece. Waiting for the Barbarians (2021), uses the final two lines of C. P. Cavafy’s 1904 poem of the same title. In one translation, these final lines read: "Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." His neon installation consists of nine English translations, each different from the other revealing the variations in the translation's meanings and the othering role that the Barbarians were forced into. With Cavafy’s verses, Ligon is addressing cultural supremacy and its dependency on othering relation, but the tense of the lines also suggest a time when othering as a solution has past. The Death of Tom (2008) In 2008, Ligon completed a short film entitled The Death of Tom. It is based on Thomas Edison's 1903 silent film Uncle Tom's Cabin. Playing the character of Tom, Ligon had himself filmed re-creating the last scene of Edison's movie, from which he took his title. But the film was incorrectly loaded in the hand-crank camera that the artist used, so no imagery appeared on film. Embracing this apparent failure, Ligon decided to show his film as an abstract progression of light and shadow with a narrative suggested by the score composed and played by jazz musician Jason Moran. Exhibitions In 2011 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Important recent shows include: Grief and Grievance (2021), at the New Museum, where Ligon acted as a curatorial advisor; Des Parisiens Noirs at the Musées d'Orsay, Paris (2019); Blue Black (2017), an exhibition Ligon curated at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, inspired by the site-specific Ellsworth Kelly wall sculpture; and Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions (2015), a curatorial project organized with Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool. Ligon has also been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Power Plant in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015 and 1997), Berlin Biennal (2014), Istanbul Biennal (2011, 2019), Documenta XI (2002), and Gwangju Biennale (2000). Notable works in public collections Untitled (I Am a