What You See, Unseen

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Jeffrey Gibson is a multidisciplinary artist and craftsperson merging
traditional Native American materials and forms with those of
Western contemporary art to create a new hybrid visual vocabulary.
Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians
and of Cherokee descent, is forging a multifarious practice that
redresses the exclusion and erasure of indigenous art traditions
from the history of Western art as it explores the complexity and
fluidity of identity.
Gibson’s pieces range from garments and sculptural objects to
paintings and video and often involve intricately detailed and technically
demanding handwork using materials such as beads, metal
jingles, fringe, and elk hide. Mixed with references from popular
culture, queer iconography, and contemporary political issues,
the materials take on a different meaning while also calling into
question the line distinguishing contemporary art from traditional
modes of cultural production. For example, Gibson transforms the
punching bag—a common symbol of male heterosexual norms—
into anthropomorphic sculptures ornamented with brightly colored
beads and fringe skirts that evoke fashion, play with camp sensibilities,
and speak to shifting gender identities. Many of the bags
include text, pithy phrases, or song lyrics, such as “From a whisper
to a scream” or “I put a spell on you,” that speak to societal hopes
and anxieties and serve as springboards for viewers’ associations.
In a series of oversized, tunic-like garments created between 2014
and 2018, Gibson derives the basic form from nineteenth-century
ceremonial Ghost Dance shirts, which were believed to deflect bullets.
They are constructed from fabric custom printed with original
photographs and newspaper headlines, some of which refer
to the continued marginalization of Native Americans through the
destruction of sacred lands at Standing Rock and Big Ears National
Monument.
Gibson’s painting practice foregrounds affinities between patterns,
colors, and materials long used in Native American art and
those characteristic of contemporary Western. His investigations
of color relationships and use of the grid as a structuring device
engage with the history of geometric abstraction, but the pieces
also recall weaving and use materials (such as elk hide canvasses,
sinew, and beads) found in indigenous art. In resisting preconceived
notions about what the work of a Native American artist should
look like, Gibson is prompting a shift in how Native American art is
perceived and historicized.
Jeffrey Gibson