Jeffrey Gibson grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, Korea, England and elsewhere. He is also a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half Cherokee. This unique combination of global cultural influences converge in his multi-disciplinary practice of more than a decade since the completion of his Master of Arts degree in painting at The Royal College of Art, London in 1998 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. Drawing influence from popular music, fashion, literature, cultural and critical theory, and his own individual heritage, Jeffrey Gibson (b.1972, Colorado; based in Hudson, NY) 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.
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, 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’s work has been exhibited widely throughout the US over the past decade, including major solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2013 and the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art in 2018 (which subsequently toured to the Blanton Museum of Art in Texas) and a presentation at the 2016 Site Santa Fe Biennial (which also then toured). His work figured prominently in the 2017 Desert X Biennial and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Last May, the National Gallery of Art acquired a major work by Gibson; he is also represented in the collections of many major US museums including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, SFMoMA, Seattle Art Museum and many others.Gibson holds an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently a visiting artist at Bard College in New York. He is represented in the permanent collections of museums including the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Portland Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gibson is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.