Glenn Ligon Untitled (Stranger in the Village/Hands #1) 2000

  • Not on view

In 1953 James Baldwin wrote "Stranger in the Village," an essay recounting his experience as the first African American to visit a small town in Switzerland. For Untitled (Stranger in the Village/Hands #1), Ligon used glue, coal dust, and ink to stencil selections from Baldwin’s text onto a silkscreened image of the crowd at the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C. The opaque typeface and the black-and-white palette both highlight and obscure the text and image, inviting us to examine the work’s surface and consider the ability—or failure—of words to communicate on issues of race and identity.

Gallery label from Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, April 22, 2009–January 4, 2010.
Medium
Coal dust, printing ink, and adhesive on printed paper
Dimensions
38 1/2 x 50" (97.8 x 127 cm)
Credit
The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift
Object number
2224.2005
Copyright
© 2023 Glenn Ligon
Department
Drawings and Prints

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].