Stranger in the Village (Excerpt), #7
1997
Ligon’s work contains an excerpt from writer James Baldwin’s celebrated essay, Stranger in the Village: An Essay in Black and White, which was first published in 1955. Baldwin compares his experience in a sheltered European village—a place, he speculates, in which no black man may have ever set foot—to his experiences as a black man growing up in the United States. Ligon, who is of a younger generation, is equally concerned with the politics of race and racial conflict. He presents Baldwin’s text as black on black, and with this, Ligon turns the hyper-visibility of the black man in a Swiss village that is entirely homogenous and white into its camouflage opposite, making the text nearly illegible.
Coal dust and oil stick on linen
72 x 84 in. (182.88 x 213.36 cm)
Gift of William and Ruth True and the Margaret E. Fuller Purchase Fund
98.13
Provenance: The artist; [Max Protetch Gallery, New York]; purchased from gallery by Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, 1998
