Drawing influence from popular music, fashion, literature, cultural and critical theory, and his own individual heritage, Jeffrey Gibson, based in nearby Columbia County, recontextualizes the familiar to offer a succinct commentary on cultural hybridity and the assimilation of modernist artistic strategies within contemporary art. Gibson’s Cherokee and Choctaw lineage has imparted a recognizable aesthetic to his beaded works exploring narrative deconstructions of both image and language as transmitted through figuration. He is known for his re-appropriation of both found and commercial commodities—ranging from song lyrics to the literal objecthood of punching bags—repurposed through Minimalist and post-Minimalist aesthetics, which speaks to the revisionist history of Modernist forms and techniques. His sculptures and paintings seamlessly coalesce traditional Native American craft with contemporary cultural production and references, forming works that speak to the experience of an individual subjectivity within the larger narrative defining contemporary globalization.
Gibson is represented in the permanent collections of over twenty museums, including the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla.; Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine; Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Ore.; High Museum of Art in Atlanta; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art in New York City; Whitney Museum; Seattle Art Museum; and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Gibson is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. He holds a MA from the Royal College of Art, London, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, Calif.