Artists

Jeffrey Gibson is a multidisciplinary artist whose vibrant practice merges Indigenous craft traditions with contemporary art, queer aesthetics, and global pop-cultural references. A citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians with Cherokee heritage, Gibson creates paintings, sculptures, beadwork, video, textiles, and immersive installations that challenge fixed notions of identity, authenticity, and American history. His work often incorporates materials such as rawhide, jingles, metal studs, fringe, and brightly colored beads, drawing from powwow regalia, 19th-century Iroquois beadwork, club culture, and graffiti. Gibson’s art foregrounds hybridity—cultural, aesthetic, and personal—reflecting his upbringing across the U.S., Germany, and South Korea as the child of a Department of Defense engineer.

Gibson received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995) and his MFA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London (1998), the latter funded by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Early work at the Field Museum on Native American repatriation (NAGPRA) shaped his thinking around ownership, loss, and cultural memory. By the early 2010s he began integrating beadwork, quilting, and other Indigenous techniques into contemporary forms, marking a pivotal shift in his practice. In 2012 he presented his first major exhibition of sculpture and video, one becomes the other, at Participant Inc., signaling his move into multisensory installation and performance.

In 2024 Gibson became the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, presenting The Space in Which to Place Me, a kaleidoscopic pavilion blending painting, sculpture, video, flags, and beadwork to examine intertwined American and Indigenous histories. His work is known for its political resonance as well as its exuberant formal language, often incorporating textual references to music, activism, poetry, and queer nightlife.

Gibson’s work is held in over twenty major museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, SFMOMA, the Denver Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, the MFA Boston, and the Portland Art Museum. A 2019 MacArthur Fellow, he has also received an Honorary Doctorate from Claremont Graduate University. Gibson is represented by Roberts Projects (Los Angeles), Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (New York), and Stephen Friedman Gallery (London), and serves as a visiting artist at Bard College.