A rare white-on-white work from Glenn Ligon’s iconic Stranger series, ‘Stranger #77’ (2014) hovers at the edge of legibility. The text consists of an excerpt from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay ‘Stranger in the Village,’ which recounts the author’s experience of visiting a Swiss alpine town where he was the first Black man many of the villagers had ever seen. Ligon first started using Baldwin’s essay in the late 1990s, drawing upon the writer’s sense of estrangement, sorrow and anger to explore language’s inability to fully articulate issues surrounding race and identity. ‘Stranger #77’ is a part of a larger body of paintings in which Ligon stencils letters onto canvas with oil stick, creating a relief of sentences. As the stencil is moved across the canvas, oil stick residue and smudges from previous words mark the composition, deliberately obscuring some of the text. Oscillating between clarity and obscurity, ‘Stranger #77’ encapsulates Ligon’s incisive investigation of language, race and identity.
‘The movement of language toward abstraction is a consistent theme in my work. … I’m interested in what happens when a text is difficult to read or frustrates legibility—what that says about our ability to think about each other, know each other, process each other.’
—Glenn Ligon [1]
About the artist
Glenn Ligon is an artist living and working in New York. Ligon pursues an incisive exploration of American history, literature and society, across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. Important solo exhibitions include ‘Post-Noir,’ Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); ‘Call and Response,’ Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); his mid-career retrospective, ‘America,’ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (2011); and ‘Some Changes,’ The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2005). In 2021, he was inducted as a member into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Artwork images © Glenn Ligon. Photo: Jason Klimatsas
Portrait © Glenn Ligon. Photo: Paul Mpagi Sepuya
[1] Glenn Ligon quoted in Hilarie M. Sheets, ‘The Writing on the Wall,’ ARTnews, April 2011, p. 89.
