Glenn Ligon & Avant Arte

Close-up of small black particles scattered on a gray surface, creating a textured and abstract pattern.

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Two framed abstract prints hang on a beige wall above a modern black and chrome chair with a magazine on the floor beside it.

On Baldwin's Stranger in the Village

Discover the essay that inspired Glenn Ligon

A page from "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin featuring highlighted text with bold words, discussing cultural and racial themes. — Excerpt from "Stranger in the Village" that forms the basis of *Untitled (White on White)*

Untitled (White on White) and Untitled (Black on Black) belong to the seminal series, Stranger, where Ligon transcribed James Baldwin's 1953 essay Stranger in the Village onto the canvas again and again. Baldwin wrote the text written after a visit to an all-white Swiss village where his presence provoked open astonishment from locals who had never encountered a Black person before.

The legibility and illegibility of the text is what the work is about—the struggle to decipher something and find meaning.
Glenn Ligon

Over time, Ligon transforms Baldwin's reflections on race, history and estrangement into dense, pulsating fields of text to give Baldwin's words literal, physical weight. The technique evokes both the hypervisibility and invisibility of Black experience – a reminder that words, or any medium for that matter, cannot capture the full complexity of identity.