# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BiXLxRlhnLE
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16045945-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/2e6f93be6a.jpg
- **Posted:** 2018-05-04T16:29:01.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an #ArtistInAction. 
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960), an American artist from south Bronx, incisively uses text and literature to explore issues of race, sexuality, and identity in his painting, photography, and conceptual work. Ligon is best known for his paintings of texts that he created in the 1990s. Using black ink on white background, Ligon painted evocative sentences from literature, but the words become less legible as they repeat down the canvas. The repetitions paradoxically affirm and undermine the meaning of the quotes; we read it twice, or three times, but the text quickly turns into a cascading jumble of letters. Quoting figures like James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Pyor, Ligon employs sampling as a device to examine the social history of America. “Stranger in the Village”, for example, is a series of works that uses excerpts and short phrases from Baldwin’s novel of the same title stenciled onto the canvas in ink with coal dust that obscures the text. Some of the canvases have silkscreened photographs underneath the text that adds another layer of significance to the work whose racial meaning and insight is physically, and metaphorically, somewhat concealed and hard to understand. “I keep returning to it over and over again. It’s panoramic,” Ligon says of the novel, “Baldwin is in Switzerland, he’s working on a novel, and he’s thinking about what it means to be a stranger somewhere…You have to be a bit outside of something to see it. I think any artist does that. It’s an artist’s job to always have their antennas up.” #GlennLigon glennligon 
Image: Production still from the "Art in the Twenty-First Century”, 2012. Courtesy Art 21, Inc.

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 427
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 0

## Tags

glennligon, artistinaction

---
Copyright (c) Gondola