This print by Glenn Ligon (born New York, 1960) was made for The Rivington Place Portfolio (see E.163:1 to :9-2009). Ligon works with text or the 'ready-made' image which he then re-contextualises, often using humour, and endows with a new resonance. This print, a photogravure, is derived from a photograph in a textbook on conservation. The text - which he has taken unchanged from the book - reflects a passage in Ralph Ellison's 1951 novel Invisible Man, one of the major 20th-century works of literature addressing black lives and experience (and a key text for Ligon who has drawn on it repeatedly). In the book, the Invisible Man (who is black) reminisces about his work in a paint factory where only he knew the secret of mixing the perfect white paint by adding a secret quantity of black - clearly a metaphor for American society. The text Ligon has used for Stranger will immediately evoke this passage for those who know it, but its significance is obvious independent of that knowledge. The print also relates to a series of paintings, begun in 1996, in which he appropriates quotations from James Baldwin's essay 'Stranger in the Village' (1953) which details his experience of moving to a Swiss village where they had never before seen a black man.