Glenn Ligon

Untitled (I Am Somebody)

Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (I Am Somebody) is from the artist’s Door series. These paintings glean the words of public figures, and important Black writers such as James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston. Ligon would isolate certain phrases and reproduce them repeatedly with stenciled black oil stick letters on white, wooden, doors.

Untitled (I Am Somebody) references the title of a poem written in the 1950s by civil rights activist Reverend William Holmes Borders and popularized by Reverend Jesse Jackson. Ligon intentionally allows the words to smear and become illegible. By recreating the phrase repeatedly, separating it from the original context, and disrupting its legibility, the artist encourages the viewer to contemplate the meaning of the words.

Ligon’s works often explores the marginalization of Black and queer people, and Untitled (I Am Somebody), like Borders’ poem, repeats the titular phrase in a statement of identity.

“I’m interested in what happens when a text is difficult to read or frustrates legibility,” Ligon says, “what that says about our ability to think about each other, know each other, process each other.”