Artist Jeffrey Gibson’s work is a radical evaluation of self and history that imagines an Indigenous future
by Ashley Busby
In April, a celebratory performance enlivened the forecourt of the United States Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. A gathering of bold, red, columnar forms served as a muti-tiered stage interspersed with Indigenous musicians. In a swirl of fringe and feathers, performers from the Colorado Inter-Tribal Dancers and the Oklahoma Fancy Dancers performed a jingle dance, moving in precise, quick-footed steps, the air filled with the hypnotic tinkle of metal cones lining their costumes, chants and calls, and the persistent metronomic intensity of drums.
PRAY REJOICE DANCE SING, 2024
Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio.
Originating with the Chippewa people, this specific dance form was first used in acts of healing but is today widely popular on the Pow Wow circuit. Presented here on this international stage, it was a ceremony worthy only of “the space in which to place me,” the deeply beautiful yet challenging exhibition created by artist Jeffrey Gibson. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States in a solo presentation at the biennale. 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, Gibson’s bold presentation reflects upon our nation’s complex history and that of Native peoples with work that is both celebratory and critical, reverent and appraising.
THE SHAPES OF THE THINGS IN THE SPIRIT, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, vintage beaded elements, glass beads, acrylic felt and nylon thread in a custom painted frame, 70 1⁄4 x 60 1⁄4 x 2 5⁄8 in.
Copyright Jeffrey Gibson. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo by Max Yawney.
Gibson drew his title for the exhibition from Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s “Ȟe Sápa.” In her work, Long Soldier considers how language has been used to constrain, control, and diminish Indigenous identity. In the full line, she writes, “This is how you see me the space in which to place me.” Gibson removes the “you” and empowers that last phrase. He asserts that this is his moment to position himself, his work, and, more broadly, indigeneity, as he sees fit, to craft a space that might if not rectify at least acknowledge past histories of exclusion.
Similar ideas are evident in the first works encountered at the pavilion. Gibson splashes murals with his signature riotous color and pattern across the exterior walls of the otherwise staid and traditional Palladian-style exhibition hall. At the top of the façade, text wraps in a running frieze, including his title at left and the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident” at right, an invocation of the Declaration of Independence. Gibson points to the double-edged sword that is truth, suggesting that our nation’s framework was just that, a set of loose guidelines awaiting enactment. Liberty and freedom have played out differently for people and communities across our history. As noted in the U.S. Pavilion press materials, “Gibson…invites viewers to examine collective history and its capacity to prescribe a societal center and a periphery…[he] reorients this established framework and creates a new nexus that makes room for generations of marginalized voices.”