Thomas Dane Gallery has opened Prompts, Glenn Ligon's sixth exhibition with the London gallery, on view from October 13 to December 19, 2026 at 11 Duke Street, St James's. The show assembles earlier and new works that inform, reframe and appropriate one another — each piece acting as a prompt for the next.

The front room pairs two large 2026 works, Untitled (America) and Untitled (Double America), which began life as fabricators' templates for the letters of Ligon's AMERICA neons, including Rückenfigur (2009) and Double America (2012). What remains are the scorched, ghostly outlines of letters never meant to be seen — remnants that extend Ligon's two-decade meditation on the word AMERICA as a parable for the country itself.

New work turns erasure into a political act. Black Panther Coloring Book #2 (2026) takes Akinsanya Kambon's twenty-two drawings, made in 1968 as a visual history of racial injustice for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and covers the imagery with black oil-stick rectangles, leaving only text and fragments visible — an echo of redacted government files. Redacted #15 (2026) crosses out, typewriter X by typewriter X, an excerpt from James Baldwin's 1953 essay 'Stranger in the Village', a text Ligon has returned to since 1996.

The exhibition also revisits the drawings born of Ligon's 1999 residency at the Walker Art Center, where Minneapolis children coloured in Afrocentric colouring-book pages picturing figures such as Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass, the raw material for a later series. Across the show, gestures of self-cancellation read as a response to a moment in which Black and queer voices are once again being erased from public discourse.