“The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA Chicago)
AT THE THRESHOLD of this exhibition is Glenn Ligon’s Give Us a Poem, 2007, positioned immediately adjacent to the show title that spans the entirety of the gallery’s outer wall. Ligon’s neon wall work quotes Muhammad Ali’s response to a 1975 Harvard audience’s request for a poem. Ali’s succinct answer“Me / We!”is illuminated in an alternating pattern, the two words stacked one atop the other. Ligon’s use of reflexive symmetry plays on the collectivity called for by Ali to amplify a central question of “The Freedom Principle”: How does contemporary art revisit black cultural nationalisms