Jeffrey Gibson On Making Space for Joy and Justice

Sometimes a punching bag is more than just a punching bag. Sometimes it’s a vehicle for catharsis, a sturdy, heavy object to hit as often and as hard as you like until your troubles are eased. It can even be a thing of beauty. “The punching bags happened when I was working with a therapist who thought I should do work to connect my emotional self and physical self,” artist Jeffrey Gibson tells Observer of WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, part of “Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me” at the Broad in L.A. It’s a reconstituted version of his 2024 Venice Biennale American Pavilion installation.

“Something happened during a session where I just thought, I want to dress this bag and disengage this dynamic of hitting it,” Gibson recalls. “The bag became a symbol of a double-sided power relationship. Over time, I started using the inherent perception of boxing, violence and hitting at power.”

At a little over ten feet, WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT is dressed in glass and plastic beads, nylon thread and acrylic felt—a pillar of god’s eye patterns and brightly colored fringe draping to the floor. The only provocative thing about it is its title touching on the hypocrisy of American ideals versus practice. “It speaks to a contemporary life,” says Broad curator and exhibitions manager Sarah Loyer. “There’s something joyous about it even when he’s using materials like punching bags, talking to aggression or letting out grievances.”

Gibson’s grievances are in his titles—THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, as well as WHEREAS IT IS ESSENTIAL TO JUST GOVERNMENT WE RECOGNIZE THE EQUALITY OF ALL PEOPLE BEFORE THE LAW and THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT FAR TOO FREQUENTLY GOES BACK TO THE RESERVATION AND FALLS INTO THE OLD CUSTOM OF LETTING HIS HAIR GROW LONG are hyper-colorful acrylic paintings with beads and felt. The latter takes its title from a 1902 letter written by the Department of the Interior’s Office of Indian Affairs, citing the challenges of assimilating Indigenous populations. Like the punching bag, it’s provocatively titled, but the cryptic lettering that spells it out in the painting is in cheerful colors that dazzle the eye.

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“Indigenous people have been broadly marginalized in our culture for as long as the U.S. has existed, and that’s not different today, though there has been an effort to use cultural institution platforms to bring more diverse voices to the public and leverage that,” says Gibson, a queer citizen of the Mississippi Choctaw tribe. “When you’re looking at these incredibly laborious crafted objects, they’re beautiful, made during a time of duress for Native American people. They’re being relocated, disseminated and decimated. And why does this object come out of that? There’s a healing that happens with craft, in the actual act of crafting. It sets forth a kind of hope in the beauty of this contained object.”

Multi-colored murals greet viewers as they enter the show and continue throughout, sometimes covering walls, other times canvases. Using a glaze overcoat, Gibson can turn 180 color tones into over 300. “I use colors to activate each other,” he says. “Spectrums of color in these murals are about how to get from one color to another. In the painting and the murals, we use a lot of transparent color, a filter that shifts everything underneath.”

The show’s only bronze sculpture is by Charles Cary Rumsey, a life-sized horse with a slumping rider called Dying Indian. On the rider’s feet are moccasins made by John Little Sun Murie, a piece he calls I’M GONNA RUN WITH EVERY MINUTE I CAN BORROW made from buckskin, glass beads and brass studs. In an adjacent gallery, Gibson’s bead sculptures, including if there is no struggle there is no progress, take the form of a psychedelic duck in the colors of the rainbow flag.

While textile costumes like WE WANT TO BE FREE and The Enforcer appear to be colorful tribal robes made of canvas, beads and nylon, they’re actually garments of his own design, straddling the nexus between powwows and raves.

“Between attending powwows and going to nightclubs in my teens, everything became the opportunity to express,” he says of his practice. “I was working on paintings, and I was dissatisfied with people reading them as formal abstraction. I always thought I was describing Indigenous material culture. That led me to work with those materials—fringe, fabric and textile beads, hide and drums. That leads to sound, which leads to dancing, and it all becomes about the body and space and the stimulation of the body.”

Born into poverty to a Cherokee mother and Choctaw father, Gibson’s itinerant youth took him to places like North Carolina, New Jersey, West Germany and South Korea. Educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Royal College of Art in London, he is currently artist-in-residence at Bard College, where he teaches studio art. His mentors include Indigenous artists like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and James Luna.

“Indigenous people have been marginalized broadly in our culture for as long as the U.S. has existed, and that’s not different today,” notes Loyer. “There’s been an effort by cultural institutions to bring more diverse voices to the public and leverage that. At this moment, a project that engages with a broad sector of U.S. history and takes a long view of history with a critical eye and vibrant colors, a sense of joy and optimism, I think that’s really what we need.”

About 15 years ago, Gibson nearly quit the art world. “I’d cut up canvases, wash them in the washer, I destroyed things,” he says, frowning. “I stopped and started teaching full time again. And one day you go, I think I’ll go make a painting today.”

It was a pair of 2012 shows he did at New York’s Participant and Germany’s ACA Galleries that turned it around for him when, for the first time, he felt a true connection with viewers.

Yet there are those who are unimpressed. “POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT,” his current exhibition at MASS MoCA, was targeted by the Trump administration, which terminated a $50,000 NEA grant. “It’s sad,” Gibson says of the move. “The museum and I are appealing it. But I think the NEA is so important. They (the administration) make it very clear what they want to support. There’s no mystery. I personally don’t think anyone should be silenced. We don’t have to agree; we have to be civil. I’m an advocate of equality. I think we all win with it. We all are better off.”

“Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me” is at the Broad in L.A. through September 28, 2025.