In 2013, Ligon started writing letters to artists whose work had made an impression on him in his life, asking if he could borrow that particular work for an exhibition. While some of the letters were sent to living artists, others are letters that Ligon would have sent to those of the past, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The resulting show at Nottingham Contemporary in 2015 featured work by 45 different artists from Warhol to Steve McQueen, as well as Black Panther Party posters, press shots and footage from the Birmingham riot of 1963. He also included seven of his own works in the show. Ligon also curated the 2017 exhibition "Blue Black" at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, which was inspired by the museum's permanent, site-specific sculpture of the same name by Ellsworth Kelly. Featuring nearly sixty works, including several of Ligon's, the exhibition explored the appearance of blue and black in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. According to critic Holland Cotter, the effect of "Blue Black" was "a show that isn't reductively 'racial' but includes race on a spectrum of meanings that runs from polemical to personal and poetic."