Jeffrey Gibson: THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING

Jeffrey Gibson’s practice mixes Indigenous aesthetic histories with the visual language of Modernism to explore culture, history, and identity. The artist works with garments, sculpture, performance, video, and painting to consider the complex and fluid narratives surrounding selfhood in this country. Gibson uses his surroundings as sources, mixing references from contemporary politics with pop culture and queer iconography to create unexpected connections within his world.

This exhibition and related performance Jeffrey Gibson: THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING evolves out of conversations around Indigenous kinship philosophy—the idea of seeing the land as an extension of one’s own family or oneself, and prioritizes looking at everything in our surroundings as an equal living entity. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson’s work both acknowledges and embraces these perspectives.

The artist presents an assemblage of anthropomorphized sculptural heads that incorporate stones, fossils, and other natural materials, representative of geologic and natural time on the Aspen Art Museum rooftop. These are presented in dialogue with a grouping of Gibson’s signature brightly colored flags, each with a different pattern, text, lyric, or slogan. In the galleries, the exhibition also includes a corresponding video filmed on site in Aspen that features a group of 15 flag spinners performing and speaking to the land in multiple outdoor sites throughout the Roaring Fork Valley.

Performers featured in THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING include Danya Ahram, Leo Balcer, Katie Cox, Donna Daugherty, Natalie Harris, Madi Miller, Serenity Monroe, Nazhoné Morgan, Madeline Morales, Emily Nunemaker, Omar Pena, Elijah Sena, Rosie Small Farley, Megan Templeton, and Ryan Vela.

Exhibition Images

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Installation view: Jeffrey Gibson, THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING, 2022.Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York; Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photo: Daniel Perez

About Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, USA) combines Native American traditions with the visual languages of Modernism to explore the contemporary confluence of personal identity, culture, history, and international social narratives. Gibson isa member of the Choctaw and Cherokee nations. He currently lives and works in Hudson, New York.

Growing up, Gibson traveled extensively with his family, living for long periods of time in Germany, Korea, and the United States. While moving from place to place, he found solace and friendship in the music scene, at various times exploring the sounds and social traditions of the punk and rave music of his generation, and the Pow-Wow traditions of his Native heritage. These influences helped him to contextualize the power of costumes as objects that can transform the wearer and helped him understand the contemporary desire to be able to take agency over our own identities.

Gibson’s multicultural perspective also informed his study of art history, and helped him to develop his personal style. That style has manifested across several dynamic and diverse bodies of work, in which traditional Native materials like animal hides, beads, and tipi poles intermingle with modern mediums like spray paint, acrylics, ceramic, and tape. One of his most recognized series involves punching bags that Gibson deftly transforms into aesthetic totems.

Another of Gibson’s long running series involves an examination of ceremonial garments. Several of these works were exhibited in a special installation at the entrance to the 2018 New York Armory Show, as well as in the entrance to the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The garments express a range of perspectives and influences, and seem to anticipate inhabitation, like symbols of history and culture that possess both personal and wider social meaning.

Gibson’s work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the EiteljorgMuseum, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.

Jeffrey Gibson: THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING

Exhibition Images

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