A close look at this seemingly abstract painting reveals thick, muddled layers of text. In this painting and others in Glenn Ligon’s White series, the artist reproduced passages from the essay White (1988), an analysis of the biased portrayal of race in media and culture. Written by film scholar Richard Dyer (born 1945), the essay unpacks the cultural implications of whiteness, which often remain unexamined and taken as the norm or default. Here, Ligon repeatedly hand-stenciled evocative quotes by Dyer onto the canvas, yielding textured surfaces of text. Some words are legible while others are not. The artist’s use of one color and manipulated language replicate concerns with visibility and invisibility, and the struggle for readability speaks to the often obscured histories and narratives of Black communities.