We often assume that an author’s voice is a definitive authority, or that images convey true or trustworthy representations. Yet texts and images need not be read as imposing unquestionable knowledge, but rather, as invitations for dialog.

This activity group explores how language can both restrict and expand our ways of understanding and acting in the world. We focus on Ligon's 1990 painting “Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background),” which is based on a line from Zora Neale Hurston's How it Feels to Be Colored Me.

In this section, we explore how our identities are shaped through the ideas and stories of those around us. We then consider how identity is not static but rather shaped by our contexts and conversations with others. In doing so, we focus on several examples in which Ligon creates a self-portrait out of the words of others

I love that picture of a young James Baldwin on the front of Notes of a Native Son because his face is like his prose: a Sphinx-like riddle of elegance and force.

When I look at A People on the Cover, my first thought is that I am glad that we decided to leave the cover blank.

Of course the first thing I notice is that the cover of this book is blank. And then I notice that the book is filled with book covers, which makes the decision to keep the cover of this book blank inevitable and smart.

When a book contains pictures I almost always look at these first, for the sheer pleasure of the visual stimulus (as is the case with Glenn Ligon’s book), but also to get an overview, a quick first impression of the drift and content, the trajectory of the unfolding material.