YCBA Collections Search

This portfolio was published in 2007 to support the foundation of Rivington Place, a public gallery and community space in Shoreditch, London. Rivington Place describes itself as the UK’s "first permanent public space dedicated to diversity in the visual arts" and is housed in an award-winning building designed by David Adjaye, a British architect of Ghanaian descent. As well as hosting regular exhibitions, film screenings, talks, and performances, it is the home of the Association of Black Photographers (Autograph ABP), the International Institute of Visual Arts (Iniva), and the Stuart Hall Library. The artists selected to contribute to the portfolio were chosen for their international reputations and commitment to creating work dealing explicitly with contemporary cultural issues.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

Glenn Ligon is a New York-born artist who works in a variety of media, including paintings, films, and installation. His work constitutes a sustained and profound investigation of race, identity, gender, and sexuality. He regularly references African American writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1996, Ligon began an extensive series of works entitled Stranger in response to Baldwin’s essay "Stranger in the Village" (1953), which describes his experience of living in a remote Swiss village whose inhabitants had never before seen a black man, and his resulting sense of alienation. The text in this print derives from a 1987 conservation analysis of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Peepshow, owned by the National Gallery in London. But, the accompanying image is a cross-section of a paint sample from another source. This text recalls a passage in Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1951) in which the protagonist (who is black) reminisces about working in a paint factory where only he knew the secret of mixing the perfect white paint by adding a secret quantity of black.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016