Teach with Collections: Glenn Ligon, Untitled: Four Etchings

One of the most important contemporary artists working today, Glenn Ligon first came to prominence in the late 1980s. Race, homosexuality, prejudice, and stereotypes constitute his primary subject matter, while quotation is one of his primary strategies. Untitled: Four Etchings is related‚—formally, thematically, and historically‚—to the work for which he is best known: oil-stick and coal dust "paintings" from the early to mid-1990s. Composed of two black-on-black and two black-on-white prints, the work triggers a play between legibility and illegibility, presence and absence, visibility and erasure, and white and black that operates simultaneously on many different levels. Excerpts from the writing of two African American authors anchor the work. On the black-on-white prints, Ligon repeats two sentences from Zora Neale Hurston's essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928); on the black-on-black prints, he quotes a single passage from the prologue to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). The struggle to read these texts mirrors the struggle of the "I" to assert itself; more specifically, it evokes the struggle of the African American "I" to claim its agency, voice, and worth. This struggle is not the characters' or the authors' alone: as a gay African American man, Ligon bears the burden of non- or mis-recognition as well.

Conversation prompts

How did Ligon use text instead of a figure to create a representational work?

Describe the contrasts in language, clarity, and color used in these prints. How do they affect the viewer's interpretation of the works?