James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” serves as my inspiration for an artist residency in Lucerne, Switzerland. In this essay from Baldwin’s collected essays Notes of a Native Son (1955), Baldwin uses his encounters with the villagers as an occasion to ponder the whole history of Western white supremacy and racism, arguing that “the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” He weaves the narrative of how the stigma of being a Negro in the Unites States has followed him to the remote Swiss village, Loèche-les-Bains. This essay continues to resonate within me from my first reading in 1984 as a teen on the South Side of Chicago, struggling to find and establish my cultural and artistic identity to the present as a man, an artist and matured, yet still searching, questing and questioning. If Baldwin’s idea that “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” then I must consider the notion that people and their histories can both inform and free each other, in order to move forward to form and construct meaningful narratives and nuanced histories.