Good condition.
Signed, titled, and dated on the lower part of the verso.
The surface of the artwork exhibits slight warping throughout.

Glenn LIGON (1960-) is an American conceptual artist based in New York. He works across a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, neon and video, although his main focus is painting.  Initially aspiring to be an abstract painter, he joined the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1985. It was during this period that he began incorporating textual elements into his work - marking a turning point that led him to explore themes such as race, sexuality, and identity through his art. Ligon’s works have been featured in major international exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1993) and the Venice Biennale (1997), and he has held solo exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world, including in Japan. His critical acclaim also extended to the political sphere; during Barack Obama’s presidency, one of Ligon’s works was installed in the White House - underscoring his relevance and resonance across contexts.

The work, Prologue Series #20, was created in 1993 as part of his Prologue series, which he began in the early 1990s. The work features an excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. 

Ligon paints this passage over and over again with his own hands, using a stencil on a piece of paper painted black. The text, which emerges vaguely in faint shadowy shadows on the all-black screen, evokes an abstract and ambiguous sense of the subject matter while suggesting his own identity as an African American and his social position. This work is one of the most representative of the early years of Ligon's artistic practice.