Untitled (They are the ink...)

In the present work, Glenn Ligon references the French writer Jean Genet’s posthumously published autobiography, Prisoner of Love (1986), that contemplates the marginalized identity of African Americans in the United States. The autobiography resonated deeply with Ligon’s personal experience, resulting in Untitled, where he plucks out one line from the poem— “They are the ink that gives the white page a meaning”—and presents a complex statement that the identity of the self is always predicated to a certain degree on the society that one exists in. As a gay black man, Ligon strives to express his individual identity in a way that does not rely on the implicitly racist visual and literary culture of white America. Ligon's work formally speaks to this as the black text would not be visible without the white ground - identity only becomes legible against the screen of the other.
By welcoming smudges and irregularities into almost murky blackness at the bottom of his repetitive stencil process, the text gives meaning while similarly losing its message in the continuing phrase. "There are a lot of things in our culture that seem clear," said Ligon in an interview at his studio, "but I think what the paintings are trying to do is to slow down reading, to present a difficulty, to present something that is not so easily consumed and clear" (C. Berwick, "Stranger in America: Glenn Ligon," Art in America, May 2011).