Throughout his career, Glenn Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and recent conceptual art.

Warm Broad Glow (2005), Ligon's first exploration in neon, uses a fragment of text from Three Lives, the 1909 novel by American author, Gertrude Stein. Ligon rendered the words ''negro sunshine'' in warm white neon, the letters of which were then painted black on the front. Luhring Augustine's 2013 catalog compiles photographs documenting Ligon's neon works alongside brief comments by the artist offering insight into the series' processual development through slight but significant variations on major themes.