JEFFREY GIBSON

They Teach Love

In Conversation with

Miranda Kyle

Selected as the first Native American artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, Jeffrey Gibson’s name has long been mentioned in reverential tones and in joyful celebration across the art world and Indian Country. Utilizing meticulous beadwork, text, painting, and sculpture, Gibson’s work speaks to the sum of experiences in creating self, home, and community. His exuberant palette and playful familiarity offers audiences an opportunity to explore their own interiorities and find commonality in the face of cultural differences.

This fall, the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University's School of Art and Design presents Jeffrey Gibson: They Teach Love, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, providing an opportunity for the region to experience his work firsthand. Jeffrey spoke to curator Miranda Kyle from his home studio in the Hudson Valley to discuss community, inspiration, and building home.

Miranda Kyle: Osda Sunale, Good morning.

Jeffrey Gibson: Good morning, how are you?

MK: I am very well, thank you. I appreciate you taking time out of your busy calendar to speak with me. Congratulations on your success at the US Pavilion. And on your phenomenal book, “An Indigenous Present.” In framing up our conversation today, Let’s start by talking about your exhibition at the ZMA. This is monumental for the Southeast. The region is the traditional homeland of many Native nations, notably the communities you belong to, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw and the Cherokee Nation. As you know, the visibility of Indigeneity in this region is not only complex, but minimal and to have this exhibition arriving at the ZMA during such a critical juncture in the discourse around identity, representation, and investment is invigorating. When your work travels to new cities and regions, what is your hope for audiences?

JG: Hmm, at this particular juncture in my life and my career, that question is not as easy to answer as I maybe thought it was. I think there's been kind of a renewed desire on my part to engage with the Southeast. I'm 52 years old and I think generationally I come out of a time that was still so focused and continues to be focused on representation in spaces that were inter-tribal, overt tribal representation was not happening and so I have seen that being a primary driving force of my career and my practice; very much inspired by the modalities of people like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and James Luna and Edgar Heap of Birds. Those were the people who I was familiar with from my very early twenties going forward. Now I feel like we're in a slightly different cultural moment where, at least in certain parts of the United States, there is increased visibility [of distinct tribal affiliations]. There are conversations happening that weren't happening 30 years ago, 20 years ago, some even 10 years ago in my world. I'm having to rethink what my relationship is to my own home communities. I feel like we've never, in my lifetime, felt the divisiveness so clearly. And we're experiencing things that are, in my opinion, unexpected levels of anxiety and unexpected levels of push back and violence and aggression and demand.

MK: I think that is particularly resonant. For Atlanta, which is seen as this queer mecca of the South, this bastion of civil and human rights and this progenitor of progress, but even in marginalized or othered communities there is a chokehold about this very puritanical approach to identity. And for artists who are working at those intersections or trying to reclaim space in those intersections, it's a very radical thing to do.

JG: It is, and I feel being an artist, I get to go into unknown spaces, and I get to go into what can be frightening for me. And I get to play with ideas, experiment with ideas, fail with ideas. And I think that is something that I'm looking at. The current work going on in my practice and future ideas and wanting to actually dive deeper into those spaces because I really truly believe that that's what's needed. Like that's really what's needed. If we're talking about being able to evolve beyond limited spaces, limited permissions or even the notion of permissions. It's like we have to be able to accept the difficulty of it and to be with it, you know, just kind of coexist with the difficulty of it.

MK: Did you see yourself as becoming or moving into being a radical artist in your fifties?

JG: I know, (laughs) probably not. It's also interesting. I think I've always known and I've always claimed that what I've been doing comes with a certain level of risk that I'm not sure people entirely understand. And it's been nice to talk to other artists who I think do understand what I do. In a way that they're like, oh yeah, that's difficult. Because it's difficult on an interpersonal level, it's challenging. So for instance, Chief Ben [Chief Cyrus Ben 5th elected Tribal Chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians] came to the opening for Venice and that wasn't to be expected. We, of course, invited both the Cherokee Nation representatives and the Choctaw Nation representatives to come from the very beginning. But understanding that, the Venice Biennale does not really play a role in their world with the communities there. This [Biennale] isn't something that people are paying attention to. Nor do I necessarily think it should be a priority looking at the local context of things. So here I am, this Choctaw/Cherokee artist and when he agreed to come, it felt really incredible. This is the highest-level person from my nation coming to celebrate with me. On my terms! Which is what I've always felt strongly about, and I would advocate for anybody to advocate for. Hopefully you're not changing yourself in your community, but you're getting to be yourself in your community.

MK: I think that is true as we move to a re-indigenization of how we approach individuality. Working and being in community is embracing not just this ability to be celebrated for achievements outside this pre-prescribed notion of what it means to belong to a community, but also moving into being celebrated inside and outside the gender spectrum, outside of binaries and moving beyond or breaking down that colonial mindset of, this is this box that we’re supposed to fit in. And I know we've gotten off on a tangent…

JG: No, I think, to me it's always very relevant, but I do think it's even just like hearing you talk, I feel like the words in the nineties that were running around a lot: didactic thinking. You know, I haven't really had this thought before we're talking now, but didactic thinking leads to binary thinking. And I am thinking about the ideas of my education and the people who I responded to in the nineties were really all about indulging in the multiplicities of everything. And you have to relinquish control. The minute you decide that's what you're going to do, you have to relinquish control. And things get chaotic. They feel messy. They feel uncomfortable. And I think what we're talking about now is making room to sit with the uncomfortability with the awareness that the uncomfortability turns into new skills, it comes into new ways of engaging, it comes into actually growing from. I think that where I'm at right now is I don't want to kind of rest into what could appear like the simplicity of success.

MK: Hmm. I think that's a really nice segue. I've spent the last couple of weeks leading up to this interview, digging into your practice and watching previous interviews that you've done. I’ve noticed in the last several years, there has been beautiful content that you and your team have been a part of discussing your process, your journey, art making and your philosophy of making. And at this point in your career, most art enthusiastic people even outside the art world are familiar with you and your work. I want to spend a little bit of time touching on those topics to ground the readers and give them a sense of you as an artist, a parent, a partner and an educator. You grew up globally in all these different cities around the world. You've stated how home was not tied to a place, but it was all the objects that your family took with you from place to place. There has been major emphasis recently on this conversation around place-based native identities in communities and I feel like this element of your history of carrying home is also deeply resonant with the lived experiences of so many indigenous and marginalized peoples who've been removed forcibly, had to flee or were incentivized to leave their homelands. But they carried with them warmth and joy and hope and laughter wherever they found themselves. And created family and with human and non-human kin. Could you talk a little bit about things like how you're defining home now and where a sense of place and be longing finds itself in your work.

JG: Well, you'll notice when talking to me I go into nonlinear thinking very quickly and then just sort of storytelling…

MK: It’s perfect.

JG: You know, I think that everybody really has to, at some point in their life, look at what you inherited, right? The things that you are born into that you didn't really have very much say so over. And for me, that was a lifestyle of moving around and different ways of attaching and detaching and not attaching. I would say that in the context of cultural traditions and home community, my relationships have had to intentionally be formed. And then there's the rest of my life. There's my relationship to my family and Oklahoma, there's my relationships to my family in Mississippi. And there's everything else that's been going on in my life for 52 years. And in that other part there are mamany other cultures. There are many other traditions. There are many other circumstances that have informed who I've become. Now I'm at a point where it's like: look at the buffet of Jeffrey Gibson; it doesn't really make any sense by any kind of binary standard. There's no simplistic way to talk about the cultural collage that makes up Jeffrey Gibson. And, so for me, home has had to become an acceptance that these things coexist. And they coexist through a mixture of chance, through a mixture of desire, longing, pain and joy and love. I've had to engage a holistic sense of self. To accept that all of these things exist in a world and in a time where I hear voices that want to separate these things as if they can exist independently. In my life, they can't really exist independently. They are so inherently intertwined. And I've had to find rationale within that. I feel like in many ways that if we feel a destiny, that is my destiny. This is what I have that I can contribute. This is what I've experienced. I think that I have done the best I can at accepting it, coming to terms with it; finding value in it, applying it. Being as generous as I can be with it. Showing, this is a way you can exist with this much difference going on. I think I've also gained a lot of strength from the idea of, you carry home with you. Now being a parent, we've been in the same home now for 10 years, 12 years? That's the longest I've ever been in an actual building. And I have an attachment to a structure. My children have been born and raised in this place and there's so much memory and growth here. That's new for me to feel that kind of attachment to what, I think most people would think of as, a home. And there is something so stabilizing and yet it's also making me acknowledge the anxiety that comes with not having a stable physical spot to return to. It's not that I didn't know it before, but I'm having to acknowledge it on a really personal level. Like, wow, this building has provided a sense of stability for me, a sense of safety. And with that feeling of safety you get to enact parts of yourself that you don't enact when you don't have that sense of safety. There's growth with having something physically stable.

MK: It's funny how Parenthood gives us a brand-new perspective on our relationality to place and home. But travel has been a recurring theme in your practice from visiting and researching with friends and colleagues to creating community around the world. This process of planning and going, researching, then coming back and creating really seems to mirror the craft process in your studio you often talk about: planning and execution and correction and then we come to the end of a thing and it is done. How essential do you now feel like being out in the world and continuing with this travel process is to the way you conceptualize your projects?

JG: I don't remember who made this comment to me one time, but it made a lot of sense. There's horizontal growth which is about expansiveness – think about a land expanse. I think that would include what it's like to be in Korea or what it's like to be in England, to be in London, to be in New York, Los Angeles. You're picking up all this information as you're moving through that landscape. And then there’s vertical growth. I think vertical growth requires less mass. A smaller footprint: but you go deeper. And I think that is something again, the kind of safety of home has enabled for me. To sit somewhere long enough to realize that things unfold, not always in horizontal fashions needing to take up a larger footprint. But they go deeper. I think that's where my home has allowed me to do that. This land that I'm on now, has an Indigenous history. I'm also incredibly interested in geographic history and geologic history. When you think about the planet from a geologic, historical perspective it becomes phenomenally interesting in a way that we can't even describe. Language stops working. I love that way of thinking. It takes you into the stars and the universe and huge questions about time and all of our boundaries that we've set up as humans to describe ourselves and to place ourselves. I came to realize they serve to calm our fears. We have to name it because then we can place ourselves. We have to name ourselves because then we can place ourselves. I'm intrigued by letting that go. What happens if we let that go? Then the stars suddenly become so much easier for me to view as my ancestors did and I can literally acknowledge that I come from you [stars]. The planetary divide ceases to exist and I can get to experience that as a human being and that's incredible, and at this point in my life feels very tangible.

MK: It's decentering of the humanistic ego in a really healthy way.

JG: I think so, but it's totally impossible for how the world works. I mean, I think ultimately it could be really practical, but it's a big step.

MK: Big steps feel par for the course if we look through the arc of your career. You're a quintessential polymath – you started your academic career in anthropology and then you went to archaeology and then psychology and then art. And your work draws on all these disciplines and this deep understanding of intersectional research. Many artists work from a broad palette – but you seem to really thrive in that space. If you weren't an artist, what do you think you would be pursuing and what is your current non-art area of interest?

JG: I have the exact answer because I talk about this all the time lately. I would be a horticulturist, or a gardener, definitely working with plants. Horticulture offers enough to hold my curiosity about things, and offer very tangible illustrations of philosophy and criticality of the reality we live in. Plants have the full emotional and physical spectrum that humans have. The cycle of caretaking fascinates me – we care for the the plants and connect to the earth and then we return to the earth and feed the plants. The lines again begin to dissolve quickly for me. I'm tending to a living being at a particular stage, like a particular window of its life, in my life. I think it would be fascinating.

MK: Do you have a particular plant that you're fascinated by right now?

JG: My studio is actually full of lots of plants and I think we're getting ready to go through another round of it. I think I've planted 12 trees at the studio in the last 12 months. The very first tree was really challenging. I didn’t know how to choose which tree. And then I was like, do we go with like, native vegetation? Do we go with conservation in mind? And I take it seriously. I really had to land on what is it here, what needs to be here? And so, the first one that I planted was a sugar maple. Trees take so long to grow. And so, I'm thinking through, what will I actually be around to see grow and planning for what will live beyond me. My children will see them grow. I got flowering trees because of how much joy they bring me. We have dogwood and magnolia trees. There's also bushes I'm obsessed with. We have peonies and so many flowers. In mid-July we have to take down a very large, 80-foot-tall Willow because she's not doing well and it has become a safety concern. Right now, we have her cordoned off until they're able to come and take her down. That's very sad and it's also funny, being a parent, talking about it to my kids. I just casually told them, unfortunately that tree is gonna come down and they were upset, recalling memories of being little and playing on the really long branch that touches the ground. They're like, oh that makes me sad like I climbed on that tree when I was a kid. And I was like, I know I'm really sorry. They’re only 5 and 8. (laughs) They are handling it alright. Again, that's about home and about my kid’s relationship to a tree. And I think about that when I'm planting these trees, my kids will see them grow and they will remember their time spent here. I just planted more fruit trees. So, of course, this is also about a future of being able to make food. Which is about community and family.

MK: Absolutely. Well, it sounds like I have to send you some heirloom seeds from down here. So you can have a little bit of the Southeast up there.

JG: Yeah, yeah, totally. I know it's obsessive. Now I'm going for it.

MK: I think your multi-discipline interests are important when understanding your aesthetic, which I’ve heard you describe as a cumulative aesthetic that was deeply influenced by intertribal powwows of the seventies and eighties. Can you talk a little bit about inter-tribalism versus pan-indigeneity and making from your own experience and the importance of subject authorship in the face of identity politics and identity performance.

JG: Well, let me see where to start. I've come to describe inter-tribalism as a 20th century circumstance. I think it's important for people to realize how and why inter-tribalism and pan-indianism occurred and continues to occur in certain situations. I think many people are unfamiliar with the urban relocation acts of the 20th century. And how we think about diasporic poric dynamics within Indigenous communities when people’s understanding is, they were born in the United States and they're still in the United States so where's the Diaspora? For me, inter-tribalism really came out of a self-initiated coming together of displaced Native peoples who were all looking for community. I was like this when I was in college. I was like, where's the native community in Chicago? So you find the community house. Someone takes you to the community house. And that's where I met Mavis Neconish, a Menominee woman who taught me how to sew. She taught me how to do ribbon work. She taught me how to bead. She taught me how to tan a hide. She taught me how to cook in certain ways, and she introduced me to the dancers there. Her husband was Zuni, her neighbor Dorene Red Cloud, was Lakota. And, so I think, that's where inter-tribalism exists. It maintains the integrity of the people's home communities. You bring to the table what gifts and knowledge you had and that was shared with each other. I think pan-indianism is the flattening of that subjective identification. I think that is something in which I would say is an outsider perspective on Native people. Ultimately, I think the goal is to get back to where we are recognizing the hundreds of Nations that exist and people being able to introduce themselves with a degree of acknowledgement and legibility. I think the thing is, and I've been talking about this lately, this notion of legibility and illegibility and that many times as Native people we’re given a window of legibility and if you step too far out of that suddenly you become invisible because people don't know how to read you. I'm already racially indiscriminate - like people don't ever know where to place me. And even when I tell them, they've never met a Choctaw person, they've heard of Cherokee usually, but what our traditions look like, most people are completely unaware. I think when it comes to the Southeast, you find that a lot.

MK: Absolutely.

JG: I think the subjectivity of it [cultural legibility] is something for which you are accountable to a home community. But not without a conversation. I'm not the kind of person who's just going to give in. I'd rather have a conversation about the issue at hand. Because I do think that from growing up the way that I did, and other experiences in my life, that we are the accumulation of influence from places and cultures and peoples we meet in our lifetimes. We are, we should be, a multiplicity of things. Not as messiness but a kind of overwhelming volume of information and how do we place it. I think it equates to a richer life. I don't believe that it waters things down. There's a difference between like cumulative existence versus a watered down existence.

MK: It unflattens it.

JG: Yes!

MK: Let’s talk about your love of text and words and phrases. You keep notes and emails to yourself about meaningful and resonant things like lyrics and poetry or just like word snippets that you find. As an avid style writing nerd, I see an inspiration of New York City's eighties graffiti scene in a lot of your work. What makes words important and do you think your hand style will ever be a font that we could use?

JG: It is now! It's fun. I did work with Sébastien Aubin, who was the designer for An Indigenous Present and he did create a font for me. Which is distributable. And I'm not sure that it hit where I wanted it to hit just yet. He really studied the curve of a bead and the angles that I use and my handwriting. What I've been doing over the past, my gosh, probably about 5 or 6 years now, I've been practicing my handwriting. Because I realized that I haven't liked my handwriting. I think a lot of that has to do with internal self-sabotaging tactics that we all do to ourselves. I didn't like my handwriting. So I determined to practice my handwriting. I wanted to learn to like my handwriting. And I have! And now a lot of the text that's going into things I'm handwriting and we're screen printing it, and we're digitizing it. One thing that text makes me think of is authorship. And I think that for not only Native people, but many of us who have been othered or pushed to the periphery, our voices have not been acknowledged historically and we've been silenced historically. So that muscle of authoring is underutilized. It needs to be strengthened and there's also a mental side of authoring, which requires a degree of entitlement. I know for me, I didn't feel that I had, or was entitled to having, a voice. So over the past 10 years finding my voice, literally and figuratively, has been a big part of what has created a bar for me to try to reach. And now for this current body of work that I am holding myself to writing the text. Again, this idea of vertical growth. Authorship is vertical growth. And thinking about myself and my home, who I am and what does it mean to go deep in those terms. I have to confront my own mortality and accountability to myself and humanity; asking myself, what are the parts of me I like? What are the parts that I don't like? Again, the legibility comes when I have to presume that I am representative of what it's like to be human on some level so other people will also understand and hopefully find a degree of empathy with my voice. Empathizing with how it's challenging to be human. It's challenging to live in this world. I think even at its best, it's still challenging to live in this world.

MK: I am excited to discuss with you this idea of critical thinking and theory around Indigenous contemporary artists. Very often we see the mainstream art world refuse to look at contemporary Indigenous artwork and creation with a critical lens, instead demanding overtly representational or “traditionally” coded work; only engaging in the formalist qualities of the objects created. There is a critic who is Métis, David Garneau, and he's really interested in all of us thinking about this as we move forward, attending to all of the wonderful ways that Indigenous artists and thinkers are making work. He says:

“So far, the best Indigenous-authored texts about Indigenous art are not reviews but catalogue and academic-essays, which are critical in that they explicate the context, intent and meanings of Indigenous artworks, but do not offer evaluations. They do not ask, for instance, if one work is better than other work, nor why considering a work as art is a more productive approach than considering it as a work of culture, an elaborate utility, or a trade good.”

He's interested in this idea of how institutions are holding space but not necessarily having a critical inquiry of the work, and it feels like you just touched on that a little bit with our authorship conversation. So as contemporary Native artists are winning larger art awards, being shown at premier art events, and represented by the largest blue chip galleries in the world, is criticism the last frontier? And how do we go about it in a good way?

JG: I personally gained a lot of self-awareness and understanding from Deconstructivist theory and stuff that was written in the eighties and the nineties and even going back to the seventies. What was presented to me then, gave me an abstract roadmap to understand the contemporary culture that I was living in. This idea that things were built the way that they were built – we could discuss the ethics of it, we could discuss the circumstances. But at some point, it's just like, let's map out how this came to be, right? This cultural condition. And then, with the understanding that you can change it, you can take it apart. And you can put it back together in a way that it serves other things. That was really helpful. In Western American European criticism, at some point criticism became a critique, to devalue or to invalidate certain things. I think that it just felt mean spirited. This isn't serving a greater purpose. This isn't doing the same thing for me that effective critique did for me. And I think with Native Art, Indigenous artists, I see that critique forming. Right now, there is positive movement towards looking from the perspective, looking at the artwork from the perspective of the communities that it is coming from. That's a huge shift. And what does it mean for communities to interpret a work that is beyond beyond a traditional format or materials? That language is just now being formed. What I have seen is people even looking at the ability of Indigenous languages to describe something by different standards. So things like our relationships can be described in other languages by different standards. Time is another one which is described by different standards. And I think that they're the essential building blocks that will ultimately lead to a kind of critical thinking. That's the difference between critical thinking versus criticism. First of all, with art, I think there's always the intention of the artist that has to be considered. What is the artist trying to accomplish? And as a teacher, this is how I teach. How close or far away from your intention does your artwork land? Right now with Indigenous art, especially for people who are not from that community, there’s such fear of getting it wrong. And there's such a lack of knowledge. That those questions can't really be responded to or even posed. It is critical thinking, I would say, that is really, really crucial. And we can even go back to the terms like, inter-tribal or pan-Indian. They might actually become useful again and a starting point. Do we kind of move in hundreds of different directions or is it strategic for us to come back into one meeting place.

MK: The title of your exhibition in Venice, the space in which to place me, comes from the Layli Long Soldier poem. Which is stunning and beautiful. The text is formatted as a box. That feels like a very intentional selection on your part. Can you talk a little bit about that?

JG: Layli is someone whose work I've known of for a very long time. I think she's an amazing poet, amazing thinker and writer. And I'm in awe of her writing. When I saw the box, I was like, that's that meeting of content and form that is just perfect. And my relationship to geometric abstraction, of course you know, I'm always working in that language. So when I was thinking about representing the US on a global stage, it was meant to be inclusive. The way that she writes in that moment is very much about one being relating to another being without determining that they're coming from the same perspective. It's like we inform each other. It was a meeting.

MK: Music is a through-line in your work. What is on your playlist right now? And if they made a biopic of you, what song has to be in the score?

JG: Well, I'll tell you, so we are working with a videographer who is documenting this year in my life in this 18-month window. And so she asked me to send her images and songs. And the first song I sent her was, “Wild Is The Wind,” as sung by Nina Simone. And then somebody said, oh, have you heard Lauren Hill's version of “Wild as the Wind?” And I was like, no, so we played it and it's been on repeat all the time. For me, music is also the lyrics, it's who wrote it, it's when it was written. When did it have a resurgence? And of course, who sang it. I can't extract the layers, like they're all cumulative.

MK: The layers, the culmination, are all there together, like your work. When people go to your exhibition at the ZMA, what would you recommend they listen to?

JG: “Quiet Fire” by Roberta Flack is where I feel like I was given language, or I learned language about love and the complications of loving and being loved. It's not an easy thing. I think it's presented in movies as rainbows and butterflies, but it's hard. It's hard. Love is really difficult. And that album has been with me for decades.

MK: Sgi, thank you so much for your time today Mr. Gibson, it has truly been a pleasure and I am so excited about seeing your work in Venice this fall and in seeing the work here at the ZMA.

JG: Thank you too!

The works showcased in the ZMA exhibition delve into Gibson's exploration of radical transformation, both in objects and people, as he takes viewers on a journey through printmaking, photography, painting, sculpture, and contemporary adornment in fashion. The display also includes recent works exploring performance, installation, and video, revealing the artist's foray into new expressive forms.

“We are truly honored to have the opportunity to share Gibson’s visionary work with our KSU community and the Metro Atlanta area,” said Cynthia Nourse Thompson, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ZMA. This traveling exhibition is organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Washington State University and is curated by Ryan Hardesty, Executive Director. Support for this exhibition and related educational programming has been made possible by a grant from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

Jeffrey Gibson: They Teach Love, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation is on display through December 7, 2024.

###

more stories from impact magazine…