Study for BLACK LIKE ME #2

In 1961 John Howard Griffin published Black Like Me, a personal and non-fictional journey unlike any other literary text about the injustices of civil liberties in the United States. While many black authors had written about the hardship of living in the Jim Crow South, few white writers had argued for integration. But Griffin, a novelist of extraordinary empathy devised a daring experiment. To comprehend the lives of black people, he had darkened his skin to become black. As the civil rights movement tested various forms of civil disobedience, Griffin began a human odyssey through the South, from New Orleans to Atlanta. Black Like Me told Americans what they had long refused to believe, sold ten million copies and became a national classic.

Literary allusions are common in Glenn Ligon's work. He's plucked text from the likes of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Pryor. In the present work, Ligon pulls one sentence, "All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence" and stencils in black letters across the top of the canvas, and repeats line after line until the words at the bottom dissolve into murky blackness. Reluctant to take full ownership over the appropriated snippet, Ligon's real art lies not in the phrase itself but in what happens when language is taken from its original context, repeated, painted over, effaced; in short, what the words mean to those who read them. Indeed, Griffin's text is a useful historical document that challenges the reader/viewers' notions of identity, race and humanity.
The present painting is the study for Glenn Ligon's 1992 painting Black Like Me #2, selected by President Barack Obama to install in his family's private living quarters at the White House, on loan from Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Another version in oilstick on paper is currently in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.