b. Bronx, New York, 1960
Black Like Me #2
1992
Oil stick and gesso on canvas
80 × 30 in. (203.2 × 76.2 cm)
Museum Purchase, 1993 (93.3)
© Glenn Ligon. Courtesy of the artist; Hauser & Wirth, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Chantal Crousel, Paris. Photo: Tex Andrews
Glenn Ligon’s practice employs history and language to both critique and complicate notions of race, identity, and power, with some of his best-known projects using text appropriated from authors and poets such as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Gertrude Stein. Black Like Me #2 brings together two appropriated textual references: the final line of Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variations,” which reads, “Night coming tenderly, black like me,” and John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book Black Like Me, which takes its name from Hughes’s poem. Griffin’s book recounts the journalist’s travels through the Deep South in self-imposed blackface. The sentence on Ligon’s canvas reads: “All the traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,” a reference to Griffin’s experience of obscuring his white identity. By removing the text from its original context, Ligon creates space for new interpretations of the words. Visually, Black Like Me #2 gradually negates the white space of the canvas with the repeated application of black paint stick, resulting in a metaphor that blacks out the canvas and constricts the legibility of the words.
