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The image was created by Glenn Ligon as part of a project during the artist’s residency at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in 1999–2000. Ligon began by copying pages from Afrocentric coloring books, printed by Johnson Publishing Company (the former publisher of Ebony and Jet) and other firms during the 1960s and ’70s. He then distributed these materials to children at local daycare centers—orchestrating a meeting between artifacts created in the wake of the American civil rights movement and an audience only beginning to gain historical and political awareness—who added color to the line drawings. Subsequently, Ligon selected and enlarged examples from this collaboration in a series of paintings titled Coloring. Lincoln Center commissioned Glenn Ligon on 2004 to create Boy on Tire as a signed and numbered edition of 108.
