Glenn Ligon in Cambridge, new Gauguin biography, Teresa Margolles’s Fourth Plinth commission

This week: the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, has invited the US artist Glenn Ligon to explore its history and collections, and his interventions are revealed this week. Ben Luke goes to Cambridge to talk to Ligon about the project. Few artists’ lives prompt as much discussion as that of Paul Gauguin, and a new biography of the French artist by Sue Prideaux has just been published. We talk to Sue about the book. And this episode’s Work of the Week is the piece that has just been unveiled on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Mil Veces un Instante or (A Thousand Times in an Instant) by Teresa Margolles is made up of plaster casts of the faces of 726 trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people. Ekow Eshun, the chair of the group that commissions the projects for the Fourth Plinth, speaks to our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, about the work.

Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, until 2 March 2025. Distinguishing Piss from Rain: Writings and Interviews by Glenn Ligon, Hauser & Wirth Publishers, £32 or $38. Untitled (America/Me), High Line, New York, until November 2024. Listen to our in-depth interview, A brush with… Glenn Ligon from 18 August 2021.

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux, Faber, £30; published in the US next year, by WW Norton, $39.99.

Teresa Margolles: Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant), Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, until 2026.

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