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.