Mr. Ligon has gathered diverse works of Western modernism along with African and American folk art, including artists such as Norman Lewis, Philip Guston, Andy Warhol, Joan Miró and Bill Traylor. There is a cross-section of portraiture by Cecily Brown, Jack Whitten and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; abstraction by Ross Bleckner, Jennie C. Jones and Joan Mitchell.
The show explores the spectrum of ideas between Kelly’s rigorous investigation of color and shape in “Blue Black” and Mr. Ligon’s own luminous meditation on racial violence, in a neon sculpture called “A Small Band,” placed at the center of the Pulitzer’s…