In Practice: Jeffrey Gibson
Step inside the sprawling Upstate New York studio of interdisciplinary artist Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, who represented the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Celebrating the National Gallery’s acquisition of Gibson’s 2022 sculpture Untitled Figure 2, currently on display in Gallery 10, in this film the Gallery partnered with NOWNESS to profile Gibson at the former schoolhouse that is now home to his multimedia practice.
Politicising colour and craft to embody Indigenous histories, Gibson’s practice often disarms reductive presumptions of Indigenous identity, exploring the interplay between art, nature, and activism.
Directed by Sean Frank, the first episode of the In Practice series offers an intimate portrait of Gibson’s creative process, and his commitment to amplifying Indigenous representation worldwide.
Video Transcript
There's many times when I almost walked away from being an artist. As a child I thought, ‘Where does that go?’ Like, ‘Where's that gonna exist?’
I'm the first artist in my family. I'm not the first person to make things, but I'm the first person who pursued a career as an artist. The first thing I came into was painting. It's what I understood. I intuitively have used a lot of colour my entire life. Very early on, it was heavily criticised. That compelled me to use even more colour and even make it brighter, to contrast greater. Try to make ugly colours beautiful. When I look back at painted imagery of Choctaw people, the men in particular wore like feather plumes in their hair, and there was woven textiles full of colour, and I just thought, how do we lose this comfort with expressing ourselves through adornment? Untitled Figure 2 that the National Gallery acquired is made up of thousands of bone pipe beads. It's really meant to disarm presumptions about what Native identity looks like, and at the same time, it's meant to lure you in with this tactile beauty.
There's something about craft where you actually have to envision every step of it. A piece of bead work really results from hundreds to thousands of beads creating this beautiful thing, one body of work isn't going to look like the previous body of work, so what I find, in retrospect, is it's actually always tethered to each other.
I bought this building in 2016, it's an old turn of the century school house that was built in 1904. We have eleven different classrooms here, we decided to turn the gym into the painting space. I knew there would be a sewing room, a beadwork room. Ceramics room just started two years ago.
When I was in college, most people were not familiar with Native American painters, so the frustration was really that they would just read it as abstract expressionism. I finally decided one day I was like, ‘Okay, let's just be as direct as you possibly can’.
Text has been in my work since 2013 usually to do with Civil Rights era, things that I pick up from a sermon or a lyric or a poem, topics about equality, environment. ‘Never let your spirit bend’, ‘Thou shall not steal, Thou shall not kill’, ‘I will continue to change’, ‘Speak to your ancestors’.
On nights when I would ask for advice from my ancestors, ancestral figures did come to me through dreams. Being the first Indigenous artist to represent at the 60th Venice Biennale was one of the most intense things I will ever do. And then to have the support of museums who feel that something that I have imagined is worth protecting, it's worth taking care of. It's worth ensuring that people on the other side of the world see... it's not about acknowledging that Indigenous culture ends at the border of the reservation, or ends at the border of a certain continent, but that it is entitled to move around the world as freely as it wishes.
Native histories have so many gaps that haven't been recorded. With Indigenous queer communities, many of these people are still living so we have the opportunity to actually write a narrative from First Person voices without the gaps that to me, is exciting.
