Glenn Ligon’s work investigates issues of race and identity, employing verbal provocation and cultural resonance through “intertextuality”—changing the meaning of a given text through its combination with other words or texts. These paintings represent Ligon’s best-known work and consist largely of stenciled texts by authors such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. In White 18, he quotes from Richard Dyer’s The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. The black letters blend into the background, making them difficult to read. The word “white,” painted less thickly, seems paradoxically more legible and thus politically charged in the context of the African American experience.