2022 New Editions: Jeffrey Gibson, himmak pilla and no simple word for time
Jeffrey Gibson, himmak pilla, 2022. Click to view.
Over the past decade, Jeffrey Gibson has built an impressive multi-disciplinary practice, becoming an anchor in Indigenous Futurism. Using recognizable Native American materials such as beads, fringe, and jingles in his sculptures and often substituting elk hide drums or stretched deer hide in place of canvas as a support for his paintings and prints, Gibson creates powerful statements that reorient the place and status of Native American art within contemporary culture. His colorful, graphic, and text-inclusive works are laden with multiple layers of both blatant and subtle meaning mined from his personal experiences, in turn also offering a unique representation of broader Indigenous and queer identities.
Before his artistic practice went through a dramatic shift in 2011, Gibson would have described himself as a process-based abstract painter. At the time, resisting the pressure to fit within a limited scope of what a Native American artist could or should make, he saw abstraction as a safe haven that did not require him to reveal all the complexities and insecurities of his personal history. However, as his practice grew and expanded over the following years, he did not abandon abstract painting as he developed his voice as an artist who is also a queer man with Choctaw and Cherokee heritage. Instead, by embracing materials, visual patterns, and other signifiers of his personal identities as physical and conceptual elements within his work, he now uses abstract art as a way to share who he is as an individual and to claim space for himself and other Indigenous artists within modern and contemporary art history.
By referencing geometric abstraction, maximalism, and Modernism, Gibson decidedly places his work firmly in the canon of Contemporary Art rather than allowing it to be limited solely to the category of Native American Art. However, this statement is not to deny the importance of the Native elements within his work. A crucial reason his work is so powerful lies in the materials he uses. In his two new editions, himmak pilla and no simple word for time, he decidedly incorporates handwoven beadwork within a screen printed image to comment that Indigenous art and culture has always had a place within modern and contemporary art.
Jeffrey Gibson, no simple word for time, 2022. Click to view.
himmak pilla and no simple word for time are screen prints on mat board that each include an inlaid panel of handwoven beadwork. Consisting of 3,680 beads each, the pattern of the beaded sections extends beyond its edges by way of the surrounding screen printed field. The patterns’ gradients and wave-like nature also suggest that the piece’s presence stretches even beyond the rectangular section we see. These seemingly never-ending patterns, coupled with the artworks’ titles (himmak pilla meaning “in the future” in the Choctaw language), reiterate the importance Gibson places on learning from history while considering one’s actions and their impact on the present and our collective future. With these themes ever-present in his work, Gibson has become a forerunner in the field of Indigenous Futurism.
The multiple gradients of color that Gibson used in the drums and beaded pieces he has created in the Tandem Press studio give the work a churning sense of vibrancy and liveliness. In an interview speaking about his mid-career survey exhibition “Like A Hammer” at the Seattle Art Museum (2019), Gibson discussed how he operates as an artist with the trust that we are all at an intersection of multiple cultures, times, and histories. He believes that the world is shifting and changing, and so, if you are engaged with the world, you will also be shifting and evolving. His artwork is a document of these changes in process.
