Opens Thursday, September 5, 2024
For the first time in Peoria, the works of contemporary art giant Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) are exhibited in Glenn Ligon: I Am Somebody, an intimate exhibition centering around a work on loan from the Art Bridges Foundation. The work “Untitled (I Am Somebody)” from Ligon’s famous Door Paintings of the early 1990s comes from the arguably the most impacting series of his career. These early oil on canvas works solidified Ligon as a unique force within the contemporary art world and fortified the canon of American art with the African American struggle for identity and point of view.
Historically, these works are comprised of imperfect clumps, smears and globs of oily text fragments chosen from literary masters like James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston. Ligon’s physical application of oil stick results in a forced filling of the negative openings of the plastic stencils, a kind of reverse-positive of self-actualization.
Taking its title from a poem first penned in the 1950s by Atlanta pastor, Dr. William Holmes Borders “Untitled (I Am Somebody)” repeats the phrase while increasingly creating an abstraction of dissolute progressing text. The poem was reimagined by Reverend Jesse Jackson in his inspirational recitations in the early 1970s. His free verse rendition with children on PBS’s Sesame Street in 1972 continues to be a monolithic display of self-affirmation.
Also featuring prominent works from the Promised Gift of John Heintzman and Jeff Heintzman, Glenn Ligon: I Am Somebody is the only exhibition of its kind to explore the potential for self-awareness and formative inspiration through the examination of language.
Glenn Ligon: I Am Somebody is sponsored by Art Bridges Foundation, Visionary Society, Illinois Arts Council, and Friends of Art.
Promised Gift of John and Jeff Heintzman, On Loan from Whitney Museum, On Loan from Art Bridges
