Cherokee-Choctaw artist Jeffrey Gibson has become an unmistakable voice on the international stage, with works in various disciplines championing Indigenous and queer identities, all in a riotous color palette and marked by eye-popping geometric designs. An upcoming museum show promises to extend the artist’s growing ubiquity.
“Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me” will open in May at Los Angeles’s Broad Museum. It will present an adaptation of the U.S. Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, where Gibson was the first Indigenous artist to represent the country with a solo exhibition. It also happens to be the artist’s Southern California institutional debut, and will include over 30 works comprising paintings, sculptures, flags, murals, and a video installation.
Jeffrey Gibson, 2023. Photo: Brian Barlow.
The works refer to official 19th- and 20th-century American legal documents, lyrics from pop songs, and quotes from civil rights activists, among other sources. The show’s title comes from the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s poem Ȟe Sápa, which contemplates Indigeneity and is partly arranged in a geometric format.
“Developing this project for the Venice Biennale made me interrogate my relationship with the United States as an Indigenous person,” said Gibson in press materials. “I wanted to showcase that complexity while celebrating the resilience and joy present in the liberation stories and legacies of Indigenous makers.
“The show is about turning margin and center inside out, putting topics and people who have been pushed aside in the spotlight,” Gibson continued. “I’m excited for the project to reach audiences in Los Angeles—in a way it’s coming home, from representing the country on an international stage to speaking to histories that are part of our lived experiences here in the U.S.”
Abigail Winograd, Jeffrey Gibson, and Kathleen Ash-Milby pose at the entrance to the U.S. Pavilion at the Giardini during the 60th Biennale Art 2024 on April 16, 2024 in Venice, Italy. Photo: Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images/
Artnet News picked the Venice presentation as one of the standout national pavilions, with our Europe News Editor Margaret Carrigan calling it unsubtle in its blood-red evocation of genocide and ethnic cleansing and yet at the same time somehow joyous.
One of the paintings Gibson showed in Venice, THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT FAR TOO FREQUENTLY GOES BACK TO THE RESERVATION AND FALLS INTO THE OLD CUSTOM OF LETTING HIS HAIR GROW LONG (2024), has been acquired by the Broad. It incorporates the titular text in a vivid, bright, abstract design that incorporates glass beads; the text quotes a 1902 letter written by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to a California school superintendent, lamenting Indian students’ failure to assimilate.
Jeffrey Gibson, THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT FAR TOO FREQUENTLY GOES BACK TO THE RESERVATION AND FALLS INTO THE OLD CUSTOM OF LETTING HIS HAIR GROW LONG (2024). Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photo: Max Yawney.
Also on view will be two works from Gibson’s 2020–21 Brooklyn Museum exhibition “When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks.” In one of those pieces, an equestrian bronze sculpture, Charles Cary Rumsey’s The Dying Indian (ca. 1904), shows a slumped figure wearing newly commissioned moccasins by John Little Sun Murie titled I’M GONNA RUN WITH EVERY MINUTE I CAN BORROW (2019), after lyrics from the 1971 Roberta Flack song “See You Then.”
Other works on view will include giant ceramic sculptures like the nine-foot-tall WE WANT TO BE FREE (2024), made with colorful nylon fringe, tin jingles, and steel, with the titular text, which refers to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (not a typo!) spelled out in beads. That act was the first federal law to define citizenship and claim all citizens equal under the law, and was meant to apply to formerly enslaved people.
Jeffrey Gibson, WE WANT TO BE FREE (2024). Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photo: Max Yawney.
The more recent civil rights act also makes an appearance in the large-scale mixed media painting ACTION NOW ACTION IS ELOQUENCE (2024), which refers to words spoken by New York Democratic House Representative Emmanuel Celler to his fellow representatives during a session of Congress in 1964.
Beloved singer Nina Simone inspired the work BIRDS FLYING HIGH YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL (2024), its title taken from the song “Feeling Good,” written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse and made popular by Simone in a 1965 recording. Avian shapes appear alongside a geometric rendering of the title text.
Installation view, “Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks,” Brooklyn Museum, 2020–2021. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.
“Jeffrey Gibson imbues unabashed radiant color into his paintings, murals, sculpture and video installations, signaling through his art that frank examination of difficult truths can be affirmative expressions of hope, identity and beauty,” said Joanne Heyler, founding director of the Broad, in press materials.
The Venice Biennale presentation was organized by the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, commissioned by SITE executive director Louis Grachos, and curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby, a member of the Navajo nation and curator of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum, along with independent curator Abigail Winograd. The Broad’s presentation is organized by curator and exhibitions manager Sarah Loyer with the participation of Winograd.
“Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me” will be on view at the Broad, 221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, May 10 through September 8.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
