In 2009, President Barack Obama added Ligon's 1992 "Black Like Me No. 2", on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, to the White House collection, where it was installed in the President's private living quarters. The text in the selected painting is from John Howard Griffin's 1961 memoir "Black Like Me", the account of a white man's experiences traveling through the South after he had his skin artificially darkened. The words "All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence" are repeated in capital letters that progressively overlap until they coalesce as a field of black paint. Art critic Jerry Saltz called this work a "black-and-white beauty." At the annual Gala in the Garden at the Hammer Museum in 2018, he was honored by attorney and social justice advocate Bryan Stevenson.