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Drawing influence from popular music, fashion, literature, cultural and critical theory, and his own individual heritage, Jeffrey Gibson (b.1972, Colorado; based in Hudson, NY)  recontextualizes the familiar to offer a succinct commentary on cultural hybridity and the assimilation of modernist artistic strategies within contemporary art. Gibson’s Cherokee and Choctaw lineage has imparted a recognizable aesthetic to his beaded works exploring narrative deconstructions of both image and language as transmitted through figuration. Known for his re-appropriation of both found and commercial commodities –ranging from song lyrics to the literal objecthood of punching bags – repurposed through Minimalist and post-Minimalist aesthetics, speaks to the revisionist history of Modernist forms and techniques. His sculptures and paintings seamlessly coalesce traditional Native American craft with contemporary cultural production and references, forming works that speak to the experience of an individual subjectivity within the larger narrative defining contemporary globalization.

Jeffrey Gibson is represented in the permanent collections of over twenty museums including Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey Gibson is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. He holds a MA at the Royal College of Art, London, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Gibson is currently a Visiting Artist at Bard College, NY.

Gibson will represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition, on view April 20 through November 24, 2024. The U.S. Pavilion is co-commissioned by Kathleen Ash-Milby, Curator of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum and a member of the Navajo Nation, Louis Grachos, Phillips Executive Director of SITE SANTA FE, and Abigail Winograd, independent curator, and is co-curated by Ash-Milby and Winograd.