Untitled from Runaways

Glenn Ligon

1993

A lithograph from Glenn Ligon’s Runaways series that reproduces the clinical language of a nineteenth‑century runaway advertisement alongside a small emblematic image to show how description constructs racial identity.

You first notice the heavy, formal block of black type boxed on a white sheet, its staccato, forensic voice set beneath a small kneeling figure, so the flattened text and the tiny human image press against one another.

Ligon’s work exposes how seemingly neutral, documentary language encodes power and prejudice, and helped open up text‑based portraiture as a way for contemporary art to interrogate race and historical representation.

Palette

Art Terms

Investigating identity

Exhibitions

Committed to Print

1988

American Prints, 1960–1985

1987

The Drawings of Roy Lichtenstein

1987

Twenty Lithographs: Graphic Art Processes

1941