Glenn Ligon, Sketch for Give Us a Poem, 2025

Over thirty years later the artist Glenn Ligon materialized Ali’s playful declaration with his 2007 neon and Sintra PVC work Give Us a Poem. This site-specific sculpture has become synonymous with the Studio Museum—Give Us a Poem lit the atrium of our former building for over ten years, and it will next welcome visitors into the lobby of our new building, opening in fall 2025. Give Us a Poem flashes alternate me’s and we’s, illustrating the entangled bond between two things in relationship—in this case, an ask and its answer.

For the spring/summer 2025 issue of Studio, the editors asked Ligon to this time respond to himself with an original, commissioned drawing. Ligon, who has made a practice out of correspondences between text and image, and the opacities found therein, produced a crayon sketch of his work in neon. The artist swaps black and white for the red, green, and black of the Pan-African flag. Color annotations and a note to self provide insight into Give Us a Poem’s making. In this palimpsest way, the work prepares for new audiences and the phrase “Me We” recommences its limitless configurations and interpretations.

"Me We” is a simple phrase—two syllables, two words, both pronouns. It is a call and response, it is a statement of agency, it is a request for communion, it makes an object out of subjectivity. The mirroring and symmetry of the letters accentuates the graphic nature of the English alphabet and the material qualities of the even smallest particles of language, in turn stressing the criticality of the individual to the process of collective meaning-making.