Further explore the exhibition’s theme of semi-visibility through a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Narrator: Glenn Ligon’s "Hands (Diptych)," from 1997, is made of two side-by-side panels of unstretched canvas. Each is 11 1/2 feet wide by 6 1/2 feet tall. On the left is a silkscreened image of a cropped photograph from the 1995 Million Man March in black and white. It features hundreds of raised Black men’s hands in the bottom half, the men packed in extremely close to one another. The top half is a smooth pitch black, giving the appearance that the hands are lifting into a moonless, starless night sky and lit only softly from the front. On the canvas to the right, a jet-black background has no imagery in the foreground; it is a solid black void.

The canvases were primed with gesso, a mixture of substances that creates a surface for paints to adhere to uniformly. The gesso prevents the texture of the canvas from showing through, creating a smooth, limitless darkness in the sky on the left and on the entire right side.

The photographs on the left show some palms open and fingers extended, others clenched into Black Power fists. A single hand near the right has the first two fingers straight up and touching, the other fingers and the thumb curled in. The original photo of the men has been enlarged and cropped to remove their bodies and faces. It is all hands, a few wrists, and even a fewer forearms jutting up from the bottom of the image. The hands rise up at different heights, and the rows and rows and clumps of men standing shoulder to shoulder seem to extend endlessly, giving the appearance of undulating ocean waves as the viewer scans across the canvas.

The enlargement process brings out a graininess in the Million Man March image not uncommon to photos shot on film. In this digital age, graininess in an analog photo lends an air of age and gravitas. Because the marchers’ faces were removed by cropping the photo, the men whose hands are pictured here are unidentifiable. In examining the pure blackness on the right, the viewer is compelled to ask, Who was missing from the march altogether?

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