Jeffrey Gibson: More Colors than The Eye Can See
ABOVE: Installation view, Jeffrey Gibson, boshullichi / inlvchi – we will continue to change, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025, photo by Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich
Jeffrey Gibson was far more open about the act of dreaming and the beliefs that make-up spirituality than I expected. I started our conversation saying that I like to keep things loose, that he can tell me if I’m too far out there and need to reign in. “I like to be led,” he says.
At the risk of generalizing, artists tend to avoid finitive statements. Especially to people like me. Print the words and they’ll come back. It probably doesn’t help that my questions tend to include, “I read a quote from 2014 where you said X to person Y, could you expand on that?” It’s scary. It can come off as an inquisition. Being confronted with your own words and then, God forbid, you’ve changed, or the quote was (at least) a little off.
But I asked him about dreaming and thereby led him further up and further in.
“I can listen to dreams. It’s very literal. There’s nothing non-literal when I talk about listening to dreams,” Gibson says. “I feel that it is a guiding lane. What it allows for is a greater questioning, a greater ability to imagine how what we accept as day-to-day reality could exist. There’s this multiplicity of possibilities for how you can experience the world day to day. By bringing those voices into the equation, it really opens it up to start thinking differently about time, to start thinking differently about mortality, to start thinking about what life can be.”
The dreams that he refers to are very specific. Dreaming in this way isn’t a daily practice. The dreams that he and I talk about lasted a relatively short period of time, then recurred. “They’re like memories at this point, of people that I met, who told me this.”
Talking about dreams leads to talking about spirits, and the difference between a spirit and a soul. About being able to call upon these entities in times of need or growth. About the act of communing with these things that are larger than us, that connect us to each other and to the impossibly larger thing that we float in which we call the universe.
BELOW: Installation view, they plan and prepare for the future fvni / sa lo li / squirrel for The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, silicon bronze with patina finish Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley, 2025, courtesy of the artist
“I CAN LISTEN TO DREAMS. IT’S VERY LITERAL. THERE’S NOTHING NON-LITERAL WHEN I TALK ABOUT LISTENING TO DREAMS …”
He says, “It’s comforting to believe that there are things greater than ourselves. Whether you’re speaking to the universe, or God, to a Buddha, there’s this comfort there. So, when I say a prayer now, it’s very open-ended. You can be praying to God, nature. It’s a form of asking too. There’s this immediacy to being able to ask the universe for something. It starts off by thinking, “What’s the harm of choosing to believe?” Once you open up to it, it becomes more of a practice. Once it becomes more of a practice you start to feel reciprocity with the ideas. The ideas start to speak back. They begin to influence how you move about the world.”
During research for our conversation, I found myself drawn to the images of his exhibitions rather than individual works. Looking at these again, there are two primary differences that are coming into focus. The first is seeing his work in conversation with other pieces. Just as Gibson speaks about communing with something larger, it seems that his art is at its most powerful when viewed as part of the whole. The quotes he embroiders or otherwise includes (often a mix of historical events and lyrics from his favorite ‘80s hits) seem to sing together or become a collage of something more.
Gibson’s work manifests across almost any media you can imagine. He does fabric, sculpture, video. He includes commissions from other artists. He invites dancers and musicians to perform at his exhibitions, extending the meaning of his art into their own work.
“THE DESIGNS CAN GROW AND BECOME A PAINTED VERSION, A BEADED VERSION, A DIGITAL VERSION. THE MULTIFACETED NATURE OF MY ART PRACTICE MIGHT JUST BE REFLECTIVE OF HOW MY BRAIN WORKS …”
He’s careful to paint the work with other artists as what they truly are—commissions. Collaboration isn’t the best term, as he’s more an advocate of these other artists and craftspeople and a participant in whatever they’re making. He asks them to represent themselves with the full knowledge that their work is being incorporated into the context of his installation.
A great example of Gibson incorporating and tangling the work of other artists into his installations comes from his exhibition When Fire is Applied to a Stone it Cracks. Gibson included a stature called “The Dying Indian” from the early 1900s by Charles Cary Rumsey. The statue is a stereotypical depiction of an anonymous Native warrior: naked and slumped, bareback atop his horse.
Gibson asked an artist and accomplished Pawnee/Cree dancer named John Little Sun Murie to create a pair of moccasins for the statue. Murie’s work included a line from the Roberta Flack song “See You Then,” the lyric stating, “I’M GONNA RUN WITH EVERY MINUTE I CAN BORROW.” The fully realized image gave the sculpture a new meaning, and a new life. Rumsey was a Harvard-educated white man whose art practice traded in stereotypes of a conquered frontier for wealthy East Coasters. Gibson’s intervention, with Murie’s moccasins, turned Rumsey’s tired work into something new, and something entirely more human and humane.
“I love the idea of how information transmits. Where it begins and how it travels and finds its way into the world. All my work has instigated new and more varied work. Once I opened to design, all the patterns I made and continue to make just seem to make more sense. The designs can grow and become a painted version, a beaded version, a digital version. The multifaceted nature of my art practice might just be reflective of how my brain works,” says Gibson.
Gibson made headlines in 2024 for being the artist behind the United States pavilion at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale. He is the first Indigenous artist (being of Choctaw and Cherokee descent) to represent America at the storied exhibition and used every inch of the platform to bring his message and goals to one of the largest audiences in the art world, with a show entitled the space in which to place me.
BELOW, LEFT: 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
BELOW RIGHT: Installation view, Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT, at MASS MoCA, photo by Etienne Frossard
“IT’S COMFORTING TO BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE THINGS GREATER THAN OURSELVES. WHETHER YOU’RE SPEAKING TO THE UNIVERSE, OR GOD, TO A BUDDHA, THERE’S THIS COMFORT THERE.”
“It’s difficult to comprehend Venice while you’re doing it and going through it,” he says. “We did everything possible to use Venice to explore Native American identity, and to expand the idea of identity generally. We used any way possible to expand that message beyond the footprint of the pavilion and in both time and physical space.”
This was accomplished through multiple means. The catalogue included essays by scholars and Indigenous thinkers reflecting on Gibson’s art, and art by Indigenous makers
more broadly. There was a symposium on Indigenous American craft. Indigenous performers brought the art to life through song and dance. Even the photography of the pavilion—as shown in the catalogue and elsewhere—captured the spirit of Gibson’s vision.
Gibson’s Biennale works were designed with non-English speakers in mind, without much context for race politics in the States. Many in the Venice international audience would have been mostly unfamiliar with American racial and power dynamics, at most with a broad understanding gleaned from headlines or movies.
As such, the Venice of the space in which to place me was highly curated. Gibson ensured viewers encountered the show through a particular entrance, guiding their view from one work to the next, so that the show resulted in a, singular and cumulative experience.
When the show moved to The Broad in Los Angeles in 2025, Gibson’s understanding of the works shifted. Los Angeles is home to Indigenous populations, Black populations, Latine populations that would understand the show and Gibson’s work from a more personal and intuitive place.
“The space in which to place me did not need the same exhibition when it was in Los Angeles. It opened a freedom to rearrange the show. I have done a few other exhibitions that traveled. For instance, POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT, at MASS Moca. That show is so specific to that space. It is meant to feel like there is an element that triggers memories of being in, like, a night club. And then being able to play with sound in so large of a space. I don’t know how you can translate that to every gallery or venue,” says Gibson.
The act of being present in the space, of being immersed in the totality of an exhibition seems vital to understanding Gibson’s work. His art quotes so heavily from his loves, his concerns, his lived experiences. The nightclub partying in New York City. His meditations from his current home in the Hudson Valley. The rabble rousing and the
silence. The explosions of color and their harmony. And the viewer, hanging on the string that connects it all.
Jeffrey and I spoke about the universe, the world beyond our world, the way we connect to those two. We spoke about the beings that populate the latter. I brought up my mother-in-law, who died last year. And how my father-in-law and wife see her in their dreams. How real it seems. He agreed and said that he speaks to his grandmothers even now, as he grows older, and their light is in a past that’s more and more distant. But we didn’t have a chance to speak about what it means to be a person here and now—how it feels to be able to see, but in so limited a way. To see in front of us and to resort to faith that there is something beyond, something connecting, something all-encompassing. Call it God, or Nature, or Eternity.
And still, you can look at stills of his exhibitions where people are present and get a sense of what that conversation would have been like. To see individuals speaking to each other about his art. Posing next to it for a photo. Staring, and it’s clear that they’ve been staring for some time. Pondering, thinking, communing. Pulling at the string that connects us all, and feeling the hum—the om that follows.
And to look at people in the gallery, viewing Gibson’s work in concert with other works as the artist intended, another Roberta Flack song comes to mind: “I think of all the many ways / That You were here with us today / And I say a prayer, goodnight.”*
BELOW: Installation views, 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
FOLLOWED BY: Installation view, Jeffrey Gibson, boshullichi / inlvchi – we will continue to change, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025, photo by Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich
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