Stories of Difference


Glen Ligon

Condition Report

2000 

2006.78.A. + 2006.78B

 


Faith Ringgold 

Black Light Series #8: Red White Black Nigger

1969

2014.18

 

Carrie Mae Weems

You Became a Scientific Profile

1995-96

P2001.28.1

 

Carrie Mae Weems

& A Photographic Subject

1995-96

P2001.28.4

 

 

Individually and collectively these four objects tell the story of difference through reckoning with identity. In Condition Report, Glen Ligon appropriated the signage carried by black sanitation workers during a 1968 strike in Memphis, Tennessee. The placard signs state “I AM A MAN” which Ligon transformed into a diptych that includes a fictive condition report. This work emblematizes difference through the counterstatement asserting humanity and similarity. 

 

Faith Ringgold’s Black Light Series #8: Red White Black Nigger is a citation of the United States flag and Jasper Johns’ flag paintings appropriating their colors and other compositional devices. Ringgold plays with language to construct a visual and linguistic history of racial oppression that underscore difference as integral to the project of cultural hegemony. Ringgold’s appropriation of Johns’ flags and the United States flag places her work within aesthetic traditions of American art. 

 

Finally, I included two works from Carrie Mae Weems’ series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. Weems appropriated four portraits from John Zealy’s 1850 daguerreotypes of Drana, Delia, Renty, and Jack from South Carolina. The two works, You Became a Scientific Profile, & A Photographic Subject, present Delia and Drana respectively. Delia appears in profile, bare breasts with her dress pulled down to her waist. Drana faces the viewer directly, similarly disrobed. The sandblasted type across their bare chests register difference as the basis for the project of scientific racism for which these images were produced. 

 

Collectively, the works I included demonstrate the instability of difference. Difference contributes to the ambivalence necessary to maintain empire. Ligon and Ringgold demonstrate difference through their counterstatements. Each takes a linguistic approach, appropriating language to demonstrate history of difference. Weems’ also posits a counterstatement through her appropriation of the Zealy daguerreotypes. 

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