Glenn Ligon: Stranger.

Glenn Ligon: Stranger Glenn Ligon, Thelma Golden, Hilton Als The Studio Museum in Harlem, February 2001 ISBN: 0-942-94919-6

Interested in signs & symbols, Glenn Ligon is a semiotician with a paintbrush. With his reproductions of runaway slave broadside advertisements, his text paintings and recent coloring book paintings, Ligon exploits the meanings, missions and ambiguities found in texts and images meant to somehow represent aspects of the African American existence. He wrests these symbols from their familiar contexts or interrupts their assumptions by blurring the text as in the recent text paintings extracted from James Baldwin's 1953 essay "Stranger in the Village".

The conversation between Ligon, curator Thelma Golden and New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als about the recent coal dust text paintings and Baldwin is especially significant. He says, "[t]he paintings are fundamentally about language and an ambivalence and pessimism about the project of communicating, of going back and forth between really wanting to communicate with the viewer and also wanting to withhold things, and the aggression of that withholding." He may even alter (some might say desecrate) our icons at his discretion as in the recent coloring book painting of Malcolm X with rouge or Isaac Hayes with Crayola flesh-tone skin and a yellow beard. In the iconographic truisms of black representation, Ligon questions the "truth." And, according to catalogue essayist Wayne Koestenbaum, "The good may be approached only through the sacrilegious vocabulary of the out-of-bounds."

Like James Baldwin, Ligon is a self-identified outsider--not only to the wealthy Upper West Side private school classmates of his youth, but also to his family's South Bronx neighborhood, and to popularly held notions of blackness as well as maleness. "It is from [this] position," says Ligon, "that of the outsider, from which you can actually say the most." Regrettably these books are less than 100 pages put together, but they provide key insight into the artist's mission.