Are those two words, installed in such a prominent manner, meant to shock?
“Shock,” repeated Mr. Ligon, a bit surprised at the question. “It’s not provocative, it’s Gertrude Stein.”

“A word like that is so archaic, it’s not of this time. It’s about language.”  Since the late 1980s Mr. Ligon, 51, who is gay, has been creating paintings, prints and drawings using phrases written or uttered by personalities like Mary Shelley, James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Sometimes the words appear as a line floating in the middle of a canvas; other times are they are repeated over and over in a way that makes them abstract and illegible.