Self Portrait at Eleven Years Old,

2004

<p>Ligon frequently incorporates stenciled literary texts and images of cultural heroes in his complex explorations of personal, racial, and gender identity. The richly textured <em>Self-Portrait at Eleven Years Old</em> refers to the artist’s identification with his childhood idol Stevie Wonder and derives from the cover of the singer’s greatest-hits triple LP, <em>Looking Back</em> (1977). For this print, Ligon enlarged a drawn copy he had made of the cover and used a stencil to create tightly clustered circles of black linen pulp that mimic the benday dots of the original. According to Ligon, paper pulp was the most effective medium in which he could achieve a sense of the handmade, which put the image "into the teenage bedroom or the collages of an obsessed fan." </p>