Peter Mauney
Jeffrey Gibson’s “I Put A Spell On You,” a repurposed punching bag adorned with glass beads and artificial sinew.
Artistic expression, as a rule, reflects the inner thoughts and emotions of the artist interpreted through the creative process. Rarely are complex emotions expressed as vibrantly as they are in the art of Jeffrey Gibson, whose exhibit, Like A Hammer, runs June 8 through Sept. 15 at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
Organized by the Denver Art Museum, Gibson’s touring exhibit reflects the artist’s Native American roots. Gibson claims both Cherokee and Choctaw heritage; his works pulsate with brilliantly colored beading, and include such traditional materials as rawhide, tipi poles, sterling silver and animal sinew.
The son of a U.S. Department of Defense civil engineer, Gibson was born in Colorado but grew up in Germany, South Korea and the United Kingdom. Starting in high school, Gibson knew he wanted to be an artist; he earned a bachelor’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree from The Royal College of Art in London, both degrees in painting.
Following college, Gibson moved to New York City, but had difficulty finding artistic and personal acceptance within the art community. He spent a decade juggling multiple part-time jobs to pay the rent before beginning to emerge as an artist.
Gibson says he often felt like people were trying to pigeonhole him, based on his ethnicity. “No matter what I produced, people would ask what the art meant to me as a Native American,” says Gibson, who is gay. “What I do does not require me to respond in a way that doesn’t fit me. I am making artwork as a byproduct of being honest about my own experience.
“At the time I didn’t feel there was a place for me in the New York art world,” Gibson explains. “There is racism, classism and homophobia that I didn’t expect to find in the art world.”
Gibson, who now teaches at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, started seeing a therapist who introduced him to a physical trainer who helped him mitigate his frustrations through boxing. While the physical exercise with the Everlast heavy bag helped, he also was inspired to “dress” the bags with beads, as a nod to the Native American dancers who produce their own beaded regalia.
The beading offers both colorful and meticulously woven sheaths that clothe the bags in Native American patterns interspersed with words and phrases, containing the bags’ implied violence in ways sensitive to Gibson’s heritage. In one piece, titled “I Put A Spell On You,” the beading covers an entire full-size bag with only the brand name Everlast showing through. For “Our Freedom is Worth More Than Our Pain,” the artist created two smaller beaded bags balanced on the arms of a scale, each proclaiming the work’s title in beadwork. Both pieces are striking in their craftsmanship and messages.
Thniking Of You
“I am blown away by how much these bags resonate with viewers,” he says. “Producing them has helped evolve the relationship between art and emotion.”
Gibson says he is an optimist, a pacifist and a humanist interested in exploring human interaction. The show’s title, Like A Hammer, in fact, is taken from the 1949 Pete Seeger/Lee Hays protest song “If I Had a Hammer” popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary in the 1960s. The song’s themes of personal freedoms spoke to the artist.
“I always question how much was achieved through the various civil rights efforts from those days,” Gibson says. “The hammer is a symbol both of destruction and reconstruction. I never want to think all is lost and that we can’t resolve things effectively.”
Social justice is an important undercurrent to the artist’s work, and he works to achieve both his social and artistic goals with the brightest color palette possible.
Says Gibson: “I have always been a person who liked to use every crayon in the crayon box.”
Jeffrey Gibson will speak at the opening of Like a Hammer at MMoCA on June 7 at 6:30 p.m.
