By Nancy Zastudil

A project conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, nearly 20 years in the making, An Indigenous Present celebrates the work of artists working across photography, weaving, fashion design, choreography, performance, writing, and more, each of whom has creatively impacted Gibson in one way or another. The book prioritizes artists’ works and voices, especially when compared to other publications that rely heavily on academic essays to establish credibility, and the nonlinear format highlights the fluid, enduring nature of creative practice. It’s truly a gift, showing how these Indigenous artists are setting the standards for creative realms that are yet to be defined, while also carrying their traditions and communities forward.

By Maxwell Rabb

At the booth of Roberts Projects, visitors are greeted with a meticulously curated selection of artworks, each a standout in its own right, making it a challenge to pinpoint just a few highlights. Jeffrey Gibson—who will represent the U.S. at next year’s Venice Biennale—is renowned for his large-scale beaded paintings and mixed-media works, and presents a new piece at the booth: LOVE ME WITH ALL MY FAULTS (2023), priced at $120,000. At the other entrance is the more muted but equally striking Crossers (2023) by Luke Agada, selling for $12,000. As if distorted by heat, an image appears wavy and shimmering, as if rippling in a heat haze, with lines bending and colors blending in a mirage-like effect.

By Camille Okhio

"Painting is what I knew and understood first. I always thought I would move to New York and be an artist. Painting completed that picture for me. The other ones I became interested in later. Through movement, I wanted to communicate being free in your body. I want to show many bodies of color, in joy and movement, without self-consciousness. When you are a queer person of color, there are so many codes you grow up thinking you’re responsible for. Performance has given me the entitlement to put those down and listen to my body and what it wants."

By Megan D. Robinson

The brightly colored acrylic and graphite painting, Between Rabbit and Fox, by Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson (1972) is a study in triangular geometric forms, arranged in paterns informed by the traditional North Coast art style. The painting merges the strong shapes of formline art with a modernist sensibility and a contemporary color palette. 

By Joelle Diedrich

If a picture is worth a thousand words, each bag in the Dior Lady Art project tells a powerful story. This year marks the eighth edition of the project, which involves leading artists customizing the French fashion house’s signature Lady Dior bag. 

Queer Nature celebrates the astonishing diversity of plants – and looks at how they have inspired LGBTQ+ groups. “I think there’s comfort for queer people in nature, because it does embrace us,” says artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose new artwork, House of Spirits, was created for the exhibition. “It allows us to project everything from beauty to sexuality, even feelings of rejection and depression and death.”

By Kat Herriman

The first few pages of An Indigenous Present are dedicated to striking portraiture. They set the stage for the chorus of voices that came together to produce this watershed compendium under the direction of artist Jeffrey Gibson, who was recently chosen to represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Not encyclopedic but assembled with that lofty ambition, the book attempts to lay out the vast landscape of Native North American art being produced today. 

by Cerys Davies

Woven Histories highlights a diverse range of transnational and intergenerational artists who have shaped the field including: Anni Albers, Jeffrey Gibson, Hannah Hoch, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Ulrike Mueller, Liubov Popova, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rosemarie Trockel, and Andrea Zittel. Together, this body of work highlights the role of textiles in shaping identity and community.

By Kate Mothes

Works by more than 60 artists comprise the monumental survey, exploring myriad practices focused on and intersecting contemporary art, music, filmmaking, choreography, architecture, writing, photography, design, and more. The tome highlights the remarkable diversity of media and cultural influences across the continent. 

By Kate Mothes

“The land is always speaking and has memory,” Jeffrey Gibson says, as he describes his work in an audio guide for his solo exhibition The Body Electric at SITE Santa Fe last year. “I am frustrated to see how many people continue to abuse the land, take from it, never thank the land, or care for it. Or allow it to rest. So I ask the question: Are you listening? Are we listening?”

By Jonathan Griffin

To Native American artist Jeffrey Gibson, land acknowledgments — the practice of paying tribute, in the Americas or Oceania, to the original dwellers of the place one is in — have never felt quite enough. “I believe in land acknowledgments,” he says, “but I’m also interested in the history of the land itself, beyond the indigenous history of the land, from a geologic perspective.”

Through his paintings and sculptures, Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson employs traditional Indigenous handcraft techniques like river cane basket weaving, intricate glass beading, Algonquian birch bark biting, and porcupine quill work. These methods are used to create dazzling objects like beaded punching bags, signage that reads like woven blankets, and 12-foot-tall fringe curtains that tell stories through color.

There are exhibitions — rare as they are — that I hesitate to put words to. Not that I can’t — hey, it’s a living — but more that I’d rather not, for fear of over-prefacing your own encounter and stealing the magic.

I can’t not tell you about Jeffrey Gibson’s “Infinite Indigenous Queer Love,” just a couple of weeks’ old at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. But my fear of spoiling the sheer delight of its discovery — even for Gibson enthusiasts, and there are many — is tempered by faith that the work can handle it. Over an hour and a half one recent morning, I circled back three or four times just to be with it. No amount of gushy preface can break its spell entirely; it’s that powerful, that singular.

Outside Boston, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum has opened the exhibition Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS
QUEER LOVE, on view through March 12, 2022.

This exhibition concerns the intersections of four powerful words—INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE. The two outer terms suggest boundless spaces and generative, tender relationships. The two interior terms convey markers of identity that Jeffrey Gibson disassembles and reconstructs through his artistic practice as a queer Choctaw-Cherokee man. Altogether this title offers a bold, declarative framework for this exhibition which debuts a series of collages, an immersive display featuring three hanging fringe sculptures, and recent videos created with collaborators, musicians, and performers. 

The last year has highlighted America’s deep divides over identity and its struggles with how to memorialize the past. In the midst of these very public debates, indigenous artists are taking a different tack, creating art that encourages reflection and interaction as a way to start conversations and bridge the divides.

Gibson created the piece Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House for the 2020 Monument Now exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens. Gibson’s massive 44-square-foot artwork was inspired by the Serpent Mound of Pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, from which Gibson’s band of Mississippi Choctaw Indians descended.

by Carolina A. Miranda

Shortly after abandoning her religious vows in 1968, Corita Kent produced a series of 29 prints called “Heroes and Sheroes” that honored political and civil rights figures she admired. The prints mark a moment of departure, when Kent is increasingly appropriating images from mass media and, unshackled from the Catholic Church, her critiques of the powerful become more overt. 

By Cole Sweetwood

I am certainly not alone in feeling that their idea of the American identity has changed drastically in recent years. The “American Dream” has proved itself to be as fanciful as the name suggests. It simply never existed for the majority of Americans. Even the American flag, at one time unifying, has been so thoroughly tainted by the racist, fascist, far-right nationalists that it inspires more hatred than harmony. But, a hopeful, progressive American identity can still be found at “It Can Be Said of Them,” the newest solo exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson.

By Patrick J. Reed

Here’s a platitude: all’s fair in love and war. This, one could argue, is what Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition “It Can Be Said of Them” is all about: the love being queer love, the war being that waged against queer bodies of color who cannot voice their desires without anticipating, so as to deflect, hatred. Here’s a second platitude to consider in relation to the first, one sometimes assigned to Gibson’s artistry: it is infused with joy and resistance.

Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition features new work exploring themes of identity, as it relates to diversity and inclusivity, to uplift unique experiences, struggles and personal victories shaping the fight for LGBTQIA visibility.

By Lindsay Preston Zappas

At Roberts Projects in Culver City, a solo show by Jeffrey Gibson infuses Native American crafts with pop culture, music, and activism. Imagine a textured celebration, combining graffiti and eye-popping colors with a touch of traditional aesthetics. “Gibson is part Choctaw and part Cherokee, and his work calls upon those craft traditions,” says Lindsay Preston Zappas, founder & editor-in-chief of Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles. “So thinking about Iroquois beadwork, for instance, and infusing those traditions with a contemporary, pop sensibility.”

In this joyous display of new work, Jeffrey Gibson homes in on the “unique experiences, struggles and personal victories shaping the current fight for LGBTQIA visibility.” The title of the show is inspired by a print by Sister Corita Kent, who, in borrowing a quote by E.B. White (“It can be said of him”), changed the pronoun “him” to “them.” It Can Be Said of Them is filled with colorful affirmations: “Yes! We Can”; “They Choose Their Family”; “Bring Down the Walls.” Collectively, Gibson’s artworks are both a balm and rallying cry.

By Sarah Hotchkiss 

Jeffrey Gibson’s Nothing is Eternal, a 17-minute video commissioned by the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, distills these forking paths into a non-narrative, tripped-out, vaguely menacing yet routinely beautiful thing. First shown at the Tenderloin National Forest (an alleyway-turned-oasis off Ellis Street) on Oct. 22 with screenings online and at the Headlands scheduled for Oct. 30–Dec. 12, Nothing is Eternal meets the moment—not by being perfect, but by emphasizing the uncertainty present in all aspects of life, including our particular political arena.

By Lowery Stokes Sim

Over the last decade Jeffrey Gibson has moved from creating lyrical, abstracted acrylic landscape paintings with beaded and sculpted paint elements to a dizzingly multi-varied practice, which interfaces with the rubrics of fashion, gender, and ethnicity.

By Susan Breyer

At a time of fierce debate and continued uncertainty, Socrates Sculpture Park advances the discussion around representation of American values with Monuments Now, a three-part exhibition featuring newly commissioned monuments. The first part of the show opened on July 10th with the unveiling of Jeffrey Gibson’s beguiling work Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House (2020)

The outdoor exhibition Monuments Now, at Socrates Sculpture Park, in Long Island City (through March), feels attuned to this unprecedented summer of American reckoning. The eye-catching ziggurat Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House, by Jeffrey Gibson—a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow—doubles as a stage for a trio of indigenous American artists, whose on-site performances will be filmed and released online.

By Taylor Dafoe

In the light-filled gymnasium of an old schoolhouse in Hudson, New York, a punching bag adorned with neon beads and tassels hangs near a long-forgotten basketball hoop. A totemic sculpture stands in a carpeted classroom and masks are strung through the woodshop. This is the studio of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist known for his signature hybrid of Native American iconography and materials with late-capitalist aesthetics. It’s Indigenous Futurism, to borrow a label posited by Anishinaabe writer Grace L. Dillon: the regalia of pow-wows meets that of ‘90s rave culture, while quilted tapestries are patterned with Op art.

By Holland Cotter

Along with expanding the choice of art they show and histories they tell, museums need to loosen up their ideas about who’s qualified to do the choosing and telling. The Brooklyn Museum made a smart move when it asked Jeffrey Gibson, an artist of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, to organize an exhibition combining his own art with work culled from the museum’s holdings, including its Native American collection. 

By Rose Adams

He’s giving us a fresh look at old art. 

A Native American artist is using centuries-old sculptures and artifacts from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection to weave a new story about indigenous people. “When Fire is Applied to a Stone it Cracks,” on display at the Brooklyn Museum until 2021, juxtaposes stereotypical portrayals of American Indians with colorful new art by artist Jeffrey Gibson to show that Native Americans are a vital, living community, the show’s curator said.

“He’s looking at history and the way history has been told and telling a counter-narrative,” said Eugenia Tsai.

By Susan Delson

Jeffrey Gibson first spotted “The Dying Indian”—a bronze statue of a Native American man on horseback, by the American sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey —while he was leaving the Brooklyn Museum. Mr. Gibson, an artist of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, was struck not just by the sculpture’s suggestion of a vanishing Native American culture but by its placement behind the building, near the parking lot. “It’s such a cliché of museums to have one of these sculptures”—a Native American scene like Rumsey’s, made by a non-Native artist around the turn of the last century—“and to not know what to do with it,” Mr. Gibson said. “The first priority for me was getting ‘The Dying Indian’ inside the museum.”

By Gabriella Angeleti 

As the debate around public monuments continues to evolve, the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens is due to dedicate its annual autumn exhibition to contemporary memorials for overlooked figures and histories. The year-long programme Monuments Now aims to “evaluate ideas around effective monuments in the public sphere”, says Jess Wilcox, the director and curator of the organisation.

An exhibition in the waterfront park in Long Island City will open in May, with work by the artists Jeffrey Gibson, Xaviera Simmons and Paul Ramírez Jonas. In September, it will expand to include work by around ten artists selected through an open-call competition, and in October, a group of students participating in the park’s arts education programme will debut their own monuments. All phases of the exhibition will remain on view at the park through 2021.

By Travis DeShong

After an exhausting day, Jeffrey Gibson thought it was a friend from Chicago calling when he noticed the incoming number. He and his husband were driving through Hudson Valley and pulled over. The service was shaky. Gibson still caught enough of the call to learn he’d been named one of the 2019 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winners. Then his phone died.

“We rushed to the next town, and I charged my phone enough to call them back,” Gibson, a visual artist, said. “I finished the call and sat there dumbfounded. I’m familiar with MacArthur, but I never even knew how it worked.”

By Jacoba Urist

Artist Jeffrey Gibson, a half-Cherokee member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, takes a multidisciplinary approach to his work—he is painter, sculptor, photographer and performer. His oeuvre is an artful mashup that challenges his audience to question cultural and political assumptions. For his material, he mines his Native-American heritage, his youthful exploration of nightclub subculture and his global education in Korea, Germany, England and other countries where he lived growing up. His artistic emphasis can be said to be a collaborative embrace of marginalized identities, nonconformists and societal outsiders.

Jeffrey Gibson’s expansive exhibition Like a Hammer offers celebration, nuanced formalism, and incisive critique in the service of a vision in which indigenous material culture can occupy the same space as lyrics from a 1960s folk song and abstract painting. Gibson’s practice crosses over genres and cultural references in a way that echoes a democratic relationship to community. Originally curated by John Lukavic, Curator of Native Arts for the Denver Art Museum, Like a Hammer includes sixty-five pieces created since 2011 that reference the histories of specific cultural artifacts drawing upon Gibson’s Choctaw and Cherokee heritage and mythologies of pop culture, while at the same time encouraging a critical approach to the construction of narrative through museum collections. This confluence of traditions within Gibson’s artwork allows for the emergence of new readings and invites a set of new methodologies for display. —Emily Zimmerman

By Martha Schwendener

What if indigenous people could turn the tables on colonial powers, ingesting their cultures and using them for their own ends? The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto” (1928) encouraged Brazilians to “cannibalize” or devour other (European) cultures in order to liberate themselves from domination, an idea Jeffrey Gibson borrows for his exhibition “The Anthropophagic Effect” at the New Museum.

By Gayle Clemans

Jeffrey Gibson’s art is like a beautiful hammer: a finely wrought tool capable of gentle taps or potent blows. In Gibson’s hands, indigenous craft methods, colorful abstraction and complex symbols fuse into iconic forms, knocking down boundaries between traditional Native practices and the art world, with its history of privileging certain kinds of people and certain kinds of art.

At the moment, Jeffrey Gibson is a very busy artist. With two traveling museum exhibitions, Like a Hammer (the Denver Art Museum earlier this year, the Mississippi Museum of Art through January 2019, the Seattle Art Museum opening in February 2019, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin opening June 2019) and This is the Day (the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY through December 9, 2018 and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX opening July 2019), as well as two recent exhibitions I AM A RAINBOW TOOat Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (October 18 – November 21, 2018), and DON’T MAKE ME OVER at the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery, Washington, D.C. (September 27 – November 18, 2018), he still found time to invite me to his studio in Hudson, New York.

By Carol Kino

WHEN Jeffrey Gibson’s first show at New York’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co. opens on October 18, it will be the culmination of a banner year. Since last fall, the artist, who’s 46, half Cherokee and a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, has been featured in a series of exhibitions, with group presentations at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design and Arkansas’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among others, and two major museum solos. His touring midcareer retrospective, Like a Hammer, with the beaded punching bags and geometric abstractions on hide and canvas for which he’s best known, is at the Mississippi...

By Kealey Boyd

The past sometimes acts as a trap for contemporary Native American artists. Critics, myself included, will anticipate the readers’ questions by discussing a material or pattern in terms of its ties to a tradition, preventing the artwork from taking the lead. Jeffrey Gibson brilliantly bobs and weaves through these pitfalls to assert his own creative vision in Like a Hammer at the Denver Art Museum, resulting in a new and exciting dialogue with the future of American art.

By Michael Paglia

For nearly a century, the Native Arts department of the Denver Art Museum has played a pivotal role in recasting the art of the American Indian. Starting in the 1920s with visionary curator Frederic Douglas, the DAM regarded the pottery, weavings, metal works and other objects made by Native Americans as fine art prized for its aesthetic qualities rather than simply artifacts that illuminated the anthropology of the tribes, as was then common. Another breakthrough came a couple of decades ago, when current chief curator Nancy Blomberg began highlighting contemporary art made by Native artists outside of their tribal traditions.

By Rejena Carmichael

“In 2011, I cut my old canvases with a razor,” says artist Jeffrey Gibson. “I wanted to wash the failure away.” The 46-year-old artist and Colorado Springs native has never quite felt like he “fits in” with the contemporary art world, despite having several arts degrees and a CV riddled with notable exhibitions of his sculptures and paintings.

By Ray Mark Rinaldi

Jeffrey Gibson wants to make connections: Between Native American tradition and contemporary art, between anger and release, oppression and expression, masculine and feminine, between the tipi architecture of his ancestors and the easy-breezy music of George Michael, Stevie Wonder and Public Enemy.

By David Pagel

Jeffrey Gibson has long felt like an outsider. Born in Colorado Springs, Colo., in 1972, he grew up in West Germany and South Korea, where his father, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, worked for the Defense Department supplying goods to U.S. military bases. Gibson remembers being treated as an American abroad, his identity as a Native American — part Choctaw, part Cherokee — pretty much invisible.

By Parker Shipp

It’s easy to distract yourself with the bright and shiny objects of Jeffrey Gibson. They confess. Part soothsayer, part animal, part pop—the messages are clear. Gibson’s multi-disciplinary practice is filled with sensory detail, whether it’s sculpture, painting, performance, video, light or sound—one becomes the other. The natural progression from one body of work to the next is as self-fulfilling and instinctual as a heart beat. He bangs the drum.

By Michelle Grabner

For two days during the winter of 1993, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fuscoperformed as ostensible natives from the mythical island of Guatinaui in the main lobby of Chicago’s Field Museum. In a sturdy cage, the pair of artists enacted supposedly traditional dances, crafted voodoo dolls, watched TV, and paced the interior perimeter of their confine. Fusco wore a grass skirt and face paint, while Gómez-Peña donned a wrestling mask and blue shorts. The performance was an act of absurdist cultural appropriation, which in turn exposed the unethical and routine practices of Western colonization and museology. The outrageousness of this work was stunning then, and more recently I found myself craving its critical brazenness when viewing Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition of hard-edge paintings and beaded works that also challenge assumptions of cultural ownership.