into his paintings, in the form of literary fragments, jokes, and evocative quotes from a selection of authors, which he stencils directly onto the canvas by hand. His source materials concern issues of the lives of black Americans throughout history. In 1990, he mounted his first solo show, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," in Brooklyn. This show established Ligon's reputation for creating large, text-based paintings in which a phrase chosen from literature or other sources is repeated continuously. Smudges and streaks from stenciled text layer until the repeated lines become obscured. Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988), a reinterpretation of the signs carried during the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968 — made famous by Ernest Withers's photographs of the march, is the first example of his use of text. In several other paintings, he overlaps repeating text to a point of illegibility, demanding the viewer’s attention as they try to make out the obscured words. Ligon’s Prologue Series #2 (1991) includes the opening text of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, stenciled in various shades of black and grey, the words becoming less discernible as they progress towards the bottom of the composition. He uses this same passage of text in Prologue Series #5 (1991), but obscures the words further, creating a further sense of abstraction and ambiguity about the subject. In 1993, Ligon began his series of paintings based on Richard Pryor's groundbreaking stand-up comedy routines from the 1970s. In Ligon's Stranger series, he pursues a career long exploration of paintings based on James Balwin's 1953 essay Stranger in the Village. This series began in 1996 with selected excepts rendered in Ligon's stenciling technique that gradually reduces the legibility of the text on the canvas. In 2021, Ligon culminates this series by presenting the essay in full in large scale text-based paintings. Glenn Ligon's Debris Field series began with etchings in 2012. In 2018 he extended this series to paintings. These paintings are also made with stencils but they do not reference pre-existing texts, literature, or speech acts from cultural figures directly. Instead the Debris Field series uses stencils of letterforms that Ligon has created. The letterforms are arranged in all over compositions on the canvas. Though recognizable as letters, the stenciled shapes also stack and layer on the canvas, furthering Ligon's career long engagement with issues of legibility and figuration and abstraction. To Disembark (1993) and Runaways (1993)