Jeffrey Gibson At The Broad: The Mix That Is His Art And His Life

Forbes

2 days ago

Installation view of entrance to Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, at The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025.
Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com, courtesy of The Broad
Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place at me at The Broad Museum through September 28, 2025. is the culmination of many firsts: In 2024, Gibson was the first indigenous American to represent the U.S. as a solo artist at the Venice Biennale. The Broad exhibition, which brings the Venice exhibition to Los Angeles, reconfiguring and adding to it, is also Gibson's first solo Southern California museum exhibition.
Gibson's work offers up a joyous explosion of color mixed in masterful patterns that incorporate indigenous craftwork and traditions as well as text and titles resonant of US history and American pop culture.
More specifically, Gibson's wild mix of colors in bold repeating geometric patterns recalls Vasarely-like OpArt, while the distinctive text in his works appear like the font from 1960s psychedelic rock posters. The works appear in a multiplicity of forms: From large paintings, which have hand sewn elements and elaborate beaded frames, to beaded multi-media busts and full length figures, as well as beaded multicolored birds. An existing sculpture by another artist has been recontextualized for this exhibition. There is even a multi-media video and music installation that brings the club to the museum and is sure to make you want to dance.
Installation view of Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at The Broad, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025.
Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com, courtesy of The Broad
Gibson takes his titles from resonant pop cultural phrases, such as the lyric, 'Birds Flying High You Know How I Feel,' from the Newman/Bricusse song Feeling Good, made famous by Nina Simone.
Some of the titles have a resonance with American history, from the iconic 'We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident,' to Congressman' Emmanuel's Celler's invocation to his colleagues about the Civil Rights Act, 'Action Now. Action Is Eloquence,' and a quote from a letter: 'The Returned Male Student Far Too Frequently Goes Back To The Reservation and Falls Into The Old Custom of Letting His Hair Grow Long,' regarding those schools to which Indigenous children were sent to erase their culture, and assimilate in ways that, 'Kill the Indian to Save the Man.'
Jeffrey Gibson
Image by Brian Barlow Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio
Gibson sees himself primarily as 'a collage artist,' which, while not doing justice to the power of his paintings, sculptures and installations, is a fair way of describing Gibson's life and the mix that is his art.
Gibson was born in Colorado Springs, of parents of Cherokee and Choctaw heritage who themselves were separated from their families and sent to the boarding schools that sought to 'normalize' indigenous children. His father was a civil engineer for the US Department of Defense, and the family lived for periods in West Germany, South Korea, as well as in North Carolina and New Jersey.
Gibson reflected that he was raised 'in a very racially mixed culture.' It was in Germany on school field trips that he first visited Dachau and learned about the Holocaust. And then moved to New Jersey where he lived in primarily an Italian and Jewish neighborhood. Gibson felt that he understood that 'my story, my family and myself, wasn't actually as different from these other stories as we might learn them in school.'
In the 1990s, Gibson attended the School of Art Institute of Chicago, from which he received his BFA in 1995. Gibson was interested in studying the work and legacies of Indigenous American Artists, but his teachers did not have many such artists to recommend to him. Gibson admits that he 'felt very unsatisfied' by his art education.
Installation view of Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at The Broad, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025.
Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com, courtesy of The Broad
Gibson met artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and worked at the Field Museum on the very beginnings of The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which introduced Gibson to an expansive way of looking at objects that included spirituality, history, ancestry, and even ideas of what was animate versus inanimate. 'That made it difficult to go back and just make art in the way that we might know it,' Gibson said.
In 1998, he received his Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art in London. For many years early in his career, Gibson struggled to find his voice and mode of expression. The turning point was when Gibson learned about the Museum of Modern Art's 1941 exhibition, Indian Art of the United States, curated by Frederic Huntington Douglas of the Denver Art Museum and Rene d 'Harnoncourt, director of the Indian Crafts Board. Gibson researched the exhibition in the archives of the Denver Art Museum and MoMA. To Gibson, that exhibition became a challenge 'to pick up that unfinished thread and try to continue making something from it.'
At the press preview, Gibson said, 'I realized, wow, I get to be the steward to make people aware of the diversity of Native America. And that became a responsibility to do it with a degree of ethics, but also in, in conversation with native communities. But, really, we still have yet to scratch the surface of how diverse Native American [Art] really is. '
Other artists have found the burden of representation crushing or limiting but Gibson saw it as artistic real estate that wasn't being used, and that was his to claim. Gibson's work is a vibrant expression whose subject matter is less about how the Native American population was murdered and their culture disappeared, but more a celebration of how they lived, their knowledge, their traditions, their crafts. In this way, Indigenous knowledge remains a living thing.
'I think what I do attempts to be more reflective of the world we live in' Gibson said. 'I'm continually surprised why that's even a challenge for people to understand.'
However, Gibson very much believes that in depicting the specific, one arrives at the universal. 'I'm telling my story, which is kind of a collaged hybrid narrative of how I became who I'm today. But I truly believe that [everyone] has their own version of that…What I know best is my story, but I also have to trust that my story is reflective of some version of everyone else's story.'
In her opening comments at the press preview, Joanne Heyler, founding director and president of the Broad, said, 'The works in the show resist the erasure and marginalization of indigenous and many other communities by being irresistibly joyous [in ways that] I would argue induce endorphins.'
Some critics have rejected Gibson's work as too colorful or his mix of colors as being too garish. I can only analogize this wrongheaded critique to calling any individual Gay person too flamboyant. It misses the point (and is besides the point). The colors are Gibson's alphabet, his language, his culture (as a gay, indigenous, American artist), and his mix requires mastery to work. Gibson shared with me that he has learned so much about color over his decades of experience that in his studio, he has to create a system of painted pieces of paper to catalogue the colors for which there is no name.
Installation view of "The Dying Indian," at Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025.
Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com, courtesy of The Broad
Beyond the paintings and beaded busts and birds, I want to single out two works. The first, which was not part of the Venice installation, is a monumental bronze sculpture made at the turn of the 20th century by Charles Carey Ramsey, titled The Dying Indian, which belongs to a tradition of works that seemed to speak to a level of nobility among the vanquished Native Americans. With the emphasis of vanquished, or as the title indicates, dying. Gibson's simple yet moving intervention was to commission beaded moccasins by the Nee Cree artist, John Little Sun, which bear the words of Roberta Flack's lyric, 'I'm Gonna Run with Every Minute I Can Borrow' which when placed on Indigenous warrior's of the sculptures feet, add a whole new dimension of compassion and caring to the work.
To that point, at the opening press preview Joan Hyler commented: 'Jeffrey's work tells us how beauty and cultural traditions comprise some of the strongest survival tools for combating oppression.'
Installation view of Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at The Broad, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025.
Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com, courtesy of The Broad
The other work that stands very much as a statement of Gibson's world view is his work, We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident, in which Gibson has transformed a punching bag that hangs from the ceiling, whose top half has beaded color patterns and the famous words from the Declaration of Independence while the bottom half has s series of skirts that go the floor and splay out in a circle.
This works speaks very much to Gibson's worldview that while we may live through difficult times (and be a punching bag during them), we absorb those blows, and continue living our lives in all their collaged beauty.
Or as Gibson told me, 'Times of war, times of extreme violence and inequity have happened throughout history. Even before there were non-North American indigenous people on this land, there was violence on this continent. In many ways it's a part of human nature and it is painful.'
'The more I ponder those moments in history and the moments that we're currently in,' Gibson said, 'What I think about is our fear and how we handle fear and looking at the circumstances that cause that fear. Even before this moment, we have manufactured a culture that produces anxiety… [and] a sense of instability. And in moments like this, that instability can be amplified through the media in a very easy way. '
Let me give the last word to Gibson, who told me, 'If we forget how phenomenal we are as living, engaged, imperfect beings, — that's what really marries me to craft in the way that we make things in the studio. '