Accession Number
1993/2.13.4

Title
Untitled

Artist(s)
Glenn Ligon; Gregory Burnet

Artist Nationality
American (North American)

Object Creation Date
1992

Medium & Support
etching, aquatint, spitbite, sugarlift on Rives BFK paper

Dimensions
25 in x 17 1/4 in (63.5 cm x 43.82 cm);32 3/16 in x 26 3/16 in (81.76 cm x 66.52 cm)

Credit Line
Museum Purchase

Label copy
Since childhood, Glenn Ligon has been fascinated with literature. This fascination led him to think about the political and social uses of languages. As a result, his art has focused on giving force and weight to the written word around issues of identity and race. Ligon selects phrases from works by writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Mary Shelley, and Jean Genet, then hand stencils these phrases onto canvas or the printing plate. Often the text becomes obscured as it progresses line by line, calling into question the reliability of seeing and seeing each other.
In Untitled (I Am An Invisible Man), Ligon draws upon a phrase from Ellison’s The Invisible Man. He transforms legibility into illegibility and investigates how people see and read—how they witness an incident and judge people subjectively or objectively. He is looking at the rationalization of race as well as self-identification. Speaking about this work, Ligon remarked that "...Ellison uses the metaphor of invisibility to describe the position of blacks in this country, as ghost, present and real but because of the blindness of racism, unseen. [My] prints work with this idea of invisibility by making the viewer strain to read the text, but making the text, through embossing, have a lot of physical presence."
Sean M. Ulmer, University Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, for "A Matter of Degree: Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art," November 10, 2001 - January 27, 2002
 

Subject matter
One of a suite of four etchings, this work quotes the first few sentences from the prologue of Ralph Ellison's novel "The Invisible Man." The 1952 novel about race and identity describes the challenges of living as a black man in American society. Ligon's work does not exclusively cite texts by African Americans, but instead he appropriates a wide variety of source material in order to bring attention to the connections and relationships between his own history and collective experience.

Physical Description
This print has rows of stenciled black text in all capital letters on black background. In pencil, the print is signed and dated (l.r.) "Glenn Lignon '92" and numbered (l.l.) "27/45". 

Primary Object Classification
Print

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
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Keywords
African American
aquatint (printing process)
etching (printing process)
invisible
literature (writings)
modern and contemporary art
text (layout feature)
words