In his work, the New York based, multimedia artist Glenn Ligon incorporates text from authors like Jean Genet, Ralph Ellison and Gertrude Stein, to question single reader legitimacy, as well as social constructs around race, sexuality, and gender. The 1953 autobiographical essay “Stranger in the Village” by the American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin is a key source for Ligon which the artist has returned to for decades. Baldwin’s feelings of estrangement and isolation when he was the only black man living in a remote Swiss village and where he was spoken to with racist language, are made visually complicated in Ligon’s 2009 series, Figure. Composed of acrylic, silkscreen and coal dust in a serial process that involved printing from previous paintings, Ligon’s Figure #3 shares conceptual ground with Andy Warhol’s shadow paintings. In Figure #3, the excerpted text is barely legible, a result of smears and compression that abstract the individual letters.