“The coloring books fascinated me because they were clearly linked with the project of Black liberation… Any depiction of a Black person… was a little revolution because it meant that our histories, stories, images and heroes mattered.”

—Glenn Ligon

Filled with gestural lines of childlike expression, Boy on Tire is related to a project Glenn Ligon undertook during his 1999-2000 residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which stipulated that the artist work with communities within a three-mile radius of the Walker: Ligon chose children. For the project, the artist began by copying pages from 1960’s and 70’s Afrocentric coloring books printed by Johnson Publishing Company (the former publisher of Ebony and Jet), which offered images of icons like Malcolm X and Harriet Tubman as well as Black figures performing everyday activities, such this boy on a tire swing. Ligon then distributed these materials to children between the ages of three and nine to color. He subsequently enlarged select examples from the collaboration to create a series of paintings titled Coloring. The resulting works explore historical consciousness, merging printed artifacts of the civil rights movement and an audience only beginning to form historical and political awareness.