Bowdoin College Homepage
Bowdoin College Museum of Art Logo and Wordmark

Advanced Search
Preview image of work. oilstick on paper,  Untitled (I Am an Invisible Man) 27455

Recommend keywords

Help us make our collections more accessible by providing keywords to describe this artwork. The BCMA uses the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus to provide consistent keywords. Enter a keyword in the field below and you will be prompted with a list of possible matching AAT preferred terms.

 
 

Untitled (I Am an Invisible Man)

Export record as: Plain text | JSON | CDWA-Lite | VRA Core 4

Artist

Glenn Ligon (Bronx, New York, 1960 - )

Title

Untitled (I Am an Invisible Man)

Creation Date

1991

Century

late 20th century

Dimensions

30 x 17 1/4 in. (76.2 x 43.82 cm)

Object Type

drawing

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

oilstick on paper

Credit Line

Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of The Bohen Foundation, 218.1992, © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Glenn Ligon complicates and subverts typical notions of identity through works that provocatively interrogate the visual and semantic language of race. Speaking to the larger importance of narratives penned by African American authors, Ligon notes: “I was interested in the idea of invention and self-invention in autobiography as it speaks to counteracting essentialist notions of black identity. The ‘one’ that I am is composed of narratives that overlap, run parallel to, and often contradict one another.” Ligon’s "Untitled (I Am an Invisible Man)" employs the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s 1953 novel, "Invisible Man", a book the artist first read in high school. At once countering and emulating the forces that suppressed the social existence of Ellison’s narrator, Ligon boldly imprints the letters in a stencil, creating smudgy accretions that threaten to subsume the very message they seek to convey.