Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
In a major invitation, acclaimed artist Jeffrey Gibson, Choctaw and Cherokee, will be the first Indigenous artist to represent the US as a solo artist in the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Considered the most prestigious contemporary art exhibition in the world, the exhibit hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors to see exciting new art every two years. Taking place April 20-Nov. 24, Gibson’s show, “the space in which to place me,” is a title taken from Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s poem “Ȟe Sápa.”
Gibson will bring together his vibrant sculpture, multimedia, paintings, paintings on paper, and video to fill a large historic pavilion inside and out.
“We got started, when I say we, I mean the curators and myself, agreed to put together a proposal during the Indian Market of 2022,” Gibson told ICT. “Site Santa Fe, one of the commissioning museums where I had a show, hosted us so we could get together and talk and decided this is something everybody wanted to get on board with. Once we decided, yes, we’re going to put together a proposal, we knew we had about six months to do it.
“We wrote the proposal and sent it off in April of 2023. We started making things here in the studio in December 2023. If we were selected, great, we were going to be able to have enough time. If we were not selected, then I would have found other places to exhibit the work. Everything shipped out weeks ago. Everything arrived safely.
“During all of that time, it allowed me to process what does this mean, how big of a deal this is, how much work this is. When it was announced, as an artist, I feel like, and I tell other artists this too, when you send out for a proposal, the most important thing is that you feel like you’ve been true to yourself, you feel like this is something that you would truly want to do, you really want to see this exist. I felt really good about the proposal, that’s all you can do. Then you just give it up to the universe.”
The show will be very large. Gibson has been expanding the scale of his work for years with rooms becoming installations so he will be pulling a lot of different ideas that he’s done over the years, as well as trying new ones.
“It incorporates a lot of that,” he says. “There’s performative aspects to the programs that we’re doing. There is sculpture, there is interior sculpture, paintings and video. I decided to look back at the things that I had done over the last 10, 15 years, and think about what are the things that resonate with people in a way that I’m interested in.”
Gibson is known for his use of intense vibrant color and for incorporating a lot of text.
“I feel like sometimes I worry that I’ve overused words, but my work is very much about representation of cultural and historical narratives that for whatever reason have been deemed as minorities or peripheral, rarely centralized. The title poem, when I read it, there’s one section where she writes in a way that the typography is like concrete poetry, and it takes a shape. The phrase that we’re using comes from a piece of his and it talks about the exchange of how we see each other. There’s one line in there that says ‘the space in which to place me,” and I wanted to see the Pavilion as an invitation to Indigenous people globally, but also an inclusive space of other cultures and people from other backgrounds. It is not meant to be a new, exclusive space. It’s meant to be as inclusive as we can be, as I can be.”
It’s an intriguing title because Gibson himself is placed in a lot of different areas. There is his Indigenous heritage, there is his queer culture, and his artistic and curatorial background. It’s a lot of places that he is “in,” and the title relates to all of those.
“To be honest, I love talking to people,” Gibson says. “As long as someone is comfortable in sharing an exchange of where they come from and memories and anecdotes of our families, I get fascinated. What I love is when you realize that we all come from so many different places and so many different experiences. I started seeing myself as this intersection of so many different things that maybe you wouldn’t think would come together.”
Gibson and his work are, as he says, “the proof of all these things that come together. That’s the part that I really love, and has definitely informed the text that I use in my work.”
As a visual artist, he sees text visually as well as narrative. He uses it in a different way than a lot of artists do. You have to really look at his work sometimes to read the actual text, rather than just registering as bright graphics, intersecting patterns or Indigenous shapes.
Gibson says, “Part of it came from looking at abstraction in Indigenous art histories and the use of not only geometric abstraction, but abstraction generally. And how when you step into a Western canon of abstraction, oftentimes pattern and just color become the background for things. Then there’s a figure or there’s a subject in front of that background. I think in a lot of Indigenous art histories, what people see as the background is actually the subject – the land that is being described is actually the subject or the space or even the atmosphere is actually the main subject.
“When I started working with text, I wanted something that could integrate and move back and forth, and I could have some control over how far it sits in front of the background and how far it can sit behind it sometimes. That’s where that originated from.”
His work with color and pattern – floor to ceiling wallpapers, beaded punching bags, silk screened hand drums, a giant patterned pyramid upon which he had performances – is a stunning body of work that can look historical, modern and futuristic all at the same time.
The Pavilion where he will be installing the show is a historic Italian building with many architectural details. How is he working with that?
“I have addressed every part of it,” Gibson says. “We have redone the front that has two flanking sides and there’s a courtyard. There’s a large central sculpture that sits in the center there, which is meant to be activated. There are murals on the entire exterior of the building and there are flags on poles that extend from the front of the building. The whole front has been given a total renovation. I didn’t want to erase the origins of the building, so you still see the architectural ornament of parts of the building. I’ve found places where we can install large hand-painted murals with text that’s been painted across the top. On one side, the text is ‘the space in which to place me.’ On the other side, it’s, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’
“I started looking at the founding documents of the United States and thinking about the kind of promises of equity and justice in a lot of those documents, and then moved through history. You come across individuals, you come across amendments, you come across different kinds of songs, Indigenous proverbs that are attributed culturally, but not to individuals. I wanted to show that these ideas have been proposed before. They have always been progressive people. But why have certain equalities not been achieved? That’s where the text came from that I decided to use.”
There is a very specific Mediterranean light in Venice, Gibson says. The work looks good as there are large skylights that bring in natural light from directly overhead. He is pleased with how the installation is progressing.
Though he did not grow up on a reservation, his father is Mississippi Choctaw, his mother is Cherokee from Oklahoma. He moved around a lot as his father was a civil engineer. He was born in Colorado Springs, then moved to North Carolina’s Fort Bragg Army Base. He then spent five years in Germany, then to New Jersey, followed by time in Korea and another move to Maryland, all before he turned 18. How did he connect with his Indigenous heritage?
“It’s never been a question to me that I was Choctaw,” Gibson says. “It’s always how I’ve identified. We visited my tribal chief and family. I was the city kid grandson. I just remember being very embraced. When I was in college, I reached out to Choctaw Tribal Chief Phillip Martin. I wanted to teach art on the reservation when I graduated. He wrote me a nice letter back, saying, ‘Thank you for your interest,’ but they had to shut down all arts education in the school, and shifted to trade skill-based technical school. Chief Martin’s goal was financial stability and employment with the tribe. He said to me ‘Good luck. I wish you well, we want to help you if we can.’
“When I moved to the UK after I got into the Royal College of Art in London, I sent him a copy of the letter. I called them and they said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to cover your tuition.’ And they did for the two years I was there.
“Chief Martin said to me, ‘Honestly, there’s not really any place for what you do here at the tribe after you graduate. You’re going to serve us better if you go out into the world and proudly carry with you that you’re a Choctaw man making your art.’
“There’s something healthy about being a foreigner and the humility of not knowing the language or not understanding it. You can’t move through that space with the same kind of confidence you can in your own space. I’ve just started exhibiting more in other countries. I need to learn how people understand information when I’m thinking about what I’m going to show because it’s easy for me to send something that I feel confident showing here in the US but it could communicate something completely different elsewhere. Especially in Europe, a lot of people are completely unaware of real Native American histories. I can’t presume that anyone really knows a great deal. We have to be prepared to talk to people at a very elementary level.”
Gibson’s work is included in the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and National Gallery of Canada. His recently published book, “An Indigenous Present” (August 2023), showcases North American Indigenous contemporary artists. Gibson has been recognized with numerous awards, including a 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and he is currently an artist-in-residence at Bard College.
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