Jeffrey Gibson

Anyone who has been reading my Missives for a while knows my interest in the art of Native Americans. Having grown up in the world of Old Masters and European decorative arts, it was quite a transition for me. Because like all things, you cannot have a reasonable opinion until you know something about your subject, and I had no frame of reference for either the art of the Native American or them personally until I spent a lot of time in the Southwest.

As we get older, it gets harder to accept what is new to us, be it technology or art. We must cope with the former but not necessarily the latter. Therefore, it took some time until I could understand and enjoy 20th-century art, and I am still dealing with the issues of 21st-century art. Which brings me to a 21st century Native American artist by the name of Jeffrey Gibson (1972-), Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor. He was born in Colorado Springs and grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, and Korea. He received his BFA at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1995 and his MA from the Royal College of Art in London, England in 1998. Since then, he has worked in various places in New York State.

The renowned gallery Hauser & Wirth has represented Gibson since last year in collaboration with his longtime gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. They published his biography, credits, and exhibitions, which amount to 24 pages and start in 2005.

I must admit, however, that I first heard of him last year when it was announced that he was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale becoming the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion for this international event.

Gibson with his Hawk Photo Eileen Travell

This multifaceted artist has recently been commissioned to create his first large-scale works cast in bronze, as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s program for the niches on its Fifth Avenue façade.

Photo by Jonah Rosenberg for the New York Times

The Met is calling this an exhibition because of its limited time on view and will end on June 9th. With the title “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, after a book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Gibson’s four sculptures, according to the Museum press release, “explore the metamorphic relationships between all thriving beings and the environment”, in other words, both are continually transformed by one another.

Photo by Isa Farfen for Hyperallergic

In 2015 Gibson started to assemble ancestral spirit figures of beadwork, textiles, and paint. His challenge for the Met commission was to translate his delicate structures into bronze weatherproof sculpture without losing their essence. Here is a photo by the artist from 2015 called, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” an ancestral spirit figure made from glazed ceramic and repurposed tipi pole, artificial sinew and copper jingles.

Each ten-foot bronze sculpture takes the form of an animal indigenous to the region; a hawk, a squirrel, a cayote and a deer, animals he has encountered where he lives in the Hudson River Valley and in the City’s Central Park. I was surprised to learn that you can find hawks in Central Park because all I remember are pigeons and squirrels! Here in the Southwest one can experience all four in a single week.

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

for the Metropolitan Museum

We like to pigeonhole everything, and it used to be argued that the Met should only have old art because there are modern art museums. By the same token, there is an element of surprise for museum goers in seeing indigenous artists presented outside an ethnographic context. To my mind art is art and categorizing original artistic creation as Black art, Jewish art or Indigenous art does an injustice to the artists and their work. I believe you should react directly to a work of art and only then deepen your understanding with information on the background of the artist.