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Washington University in St. Louis
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

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Glenn Ligon

Runaways

1993

Glenn Ligon’s work is often autobiographical, exploring how his own identity as a black man intersects with and is shaped by the sociopolitical circumstances and events of American culture, past and present. His print portfolio Runaways mimics the rhetoric and typography of nineteenth-century advertisements for runaway slaves in Southern newspapers, inserting various contemporary descriptions of himself in place of the runaway. The descriptions were drawn from ten of his friends, each of whom was asked to provide a verbal account of Ligon as though reporting his disappearance to the police. The texts that emerged from this process combine the casual language of physical appearance with the blunt reality of slavery. [Permanent collection label, 2017]

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