Stranger Drawing #4

In Stranger Drawing #4, Glenn Ligon recreates text from James Baldwin’s 1955 essay Strangers in the Village, a story about the habitants of a small Swiss village and their encounters with a black man—their first experience of the kind. It is a work that is inherently about race: from the choice of text, to the cultural connotations about the blackness of the medium, coal dust, Stranger Drawing #4 explores and engages the subject with intensity and purpose. An artist for whom the printed word holds deep significance, Ligon "wants to make language into a physical thing, something that has real weight and force to it" (Glenn Ligon, quoted in R. Smith, "Lack of Location Is My Location," New York Times, 16 June 1991, p. 27).