I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook, like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe, nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am am man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorted glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed everything and anything except me.
Glenn Ligon, Untitled (Ralph Ellison), 1994
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY