Jeffrey Gibson Asks for a Closer Read

In 2016, Jeffrey Gibson had an awakening. When the artist accepted an invitation from the Art Institute of Chicago for a lecture, he assumed his audience would be painting students, but the questions from the crowd proved otherwise “I was making paintings on animal hide, which until then I had not considered as fiber,” he tells Family Style. The experience prompted an exploration of “the ways artists use textile in sculptural ways,” says Gibson, “such as whether the weave is tighter or looser, or how transparent the drapery is.” 

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The most ambitious fruit of his journey into discovering fiber’s potential in storytelling now occupies the U.S. pavilion in the 60th Venice Biennale. Gibson is the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States in a solo show in the world’s most lauded art exhibition as well as one few openly queer artists to hold the honor. The Upstate-based artist’s work, titled the space in which to place me, sprawls across the Williams Adams Delano-designed Palladian style building in the Bienniale’s Giardini section, including the front yard where he has installed a mammoth scale red concrete stage-cum-sculpture. 

During last week’s vernissage, when all participating nations flexed their muscles at their designated pavilions, Gibson unveiled his presentation with a performance by a group of Colorado Inter-Tribal Dancers and Oklahoma Fancy Dancers. The fickle La Serenissima weather allowed for a sun-washed celebration of First Nations solidarity and joy amidst serpentine lines in front of the pavilions, including Gibson’s own. A potpourri of color and texture in painting, sculpture, and video is the show’s binding thread: in a suite of paintings on paper, geometric forms bleed into excerpts from America’s founding constitution as well as various written found records; the busts that may embody mythical figures or everyday people burst with strips of fabric, beads, and, again, plethora of colors. Acrylic takes sharply geometric forms in bright hues in the paintings—rhythmic processions of bold shades yield hallucinatory compositions. They resemble dance floor lights as well as colors that are embedded with collective identity in national flags. Texts, such as “Liberty when it begins to take root is a plant of rapid growth” and “Action now action is eloquence,” penetrate into the chromatic equilibrium in a nearly abstracted geometry. The militant level order between color and text is challenged with the inclusion of beads and found objects from the Columbia River Plateau.    

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The crescendo awaits in the final room where the nine-channel grid screen plays, She Never Dances Alone, 2020, featuring music by the Indigenous electro band Halluci Nation. Even the flocks of visitors during the preview could not strip away the video’s call for dance: the punchy beats falling into an absorbing loop and Sarah Ortegon HighWalking’s powwow dance moves, while donning jingles and metal cones, synch her legs with each boom, and so do we. 

The invitation to let-go is not coincidental. “I always start the idea of organizing a show with a church and a club,” admits Gibson, “because we want that spiritual experience in a club.” Coming of age in the late 1980s and the early ‘90s, he found in clubs what he calls “a space where differences were accepted and the individual was celebrated.” Today, the artist has a host of accolades under his belt, including a MacArthur grant and upcoming shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MASS MoCA, but he still tries to echo that revelatory experience of “everyone’s heartbeat going at the same speed, dancing, and sweating.”

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The aftermath equally intrigues Gibson: “when the lights go off, we look at each other and realize we are all different.” A similar search for subjectivity triggers the 52-year old artist’s approach to the Indigenous experience. He grew up in the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Cherokee communities during a period of “inter-tribalism” which put forth the suggestion of “not only speaking for my own community’s people but trying to represent and include those from different tribal nations.” Gibson’s exploration of the flag as an identity binder, as well as a divider, aligns with this duality. When he first introduced the flag iconography in his work in 2010, he was extremely conscious about the symbolism that comes with different configurations of stripes and colors. “We immediately think a flag means this identity or that nationality, but this also comes with complications of being a part of a nation,” he says. The artist considers his interpretation of a flag as “marking spaces and invitations for inclusion, even when the idea of inclusion is constantly shifting and transforming.” His responsibility, Gibson believes, is to “create work that is ethical and intentional to acknowledge this shift.”  

A crucial part of Gibson’s two-decade practice is to dismantle the institutional classification and presentation of Native American materials. “Decorative” is a grouping he has been pushing hard against, “because it dismisses the ways a work has more to say under the surface,” he says. As a storyteller, he strives to shift the public attention to the narratives infused in Native art, whether made by him at his 14,000 square-foot studio that stretches over a four-acre land outside of Hudson or by an anonymous artist centuries ago by a Northwest lake. “An Indigenous work exhibited in a museum's Decorative Arts section holds narrative, landscape, and identity,” he explains. Too, the story is oftentimes about oppression and resilience. A large painting adorned with beads reads, “The returned male student far too frequently goes back to the reservation and falls into the old custom of letting his hair grow long,” which Gibson pulled from a boarding school record about the case on an Indigenous student’s hair length. A rainbow of beads and buttons also dresses a bust, titled I’M A NATURAL MAN, 2024, in which a man with large shoulders sport straight long hair made out of tens of ribbons that lushly drapes towards its marble pedestal.

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Balancing color and form with storytelling has been a learning process for the artist his whole life “I’ve gotten better at using color in ways that letters can create depth,” says Gibson. The transformative effect of his texts stem from infusing hallucinatory abstractions into their piercing messages. At the American pavilion in Venice, he shifts the source of his words from dance songs to politically-charged texts, but their impact also rises from ambitiously leaning towards abstraction. Gibson remembers dabbling with this balance between conveying a message and maintaining a sense of obscurity: “I realized text didn’t always have to sit in the forefront, because the pattern can tell a story, too.” Early on, he moved back and forth between motifs and letters with his beads, yet he was worried that the message was getting lost. “Right when I thought I was failing,” he remembers today, “a traditional bead worker who I trust told me: ‘don’t stop; now this is incredible.’”

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Jeffrey Gibson's the space in which to place me is on view until November 24, 2024 at the Venice Biennale at Giardini, Venice.