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Venice Biennale Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Painting and Paying Tribute to Indigenous Cultural Legacies

How Arlene Shechet Makes Her Recalcitrant Materials Come Alive

In Houston, Witness drew the ire of Texas Right to Life, an anti-choice Christian group. Picking up on a description in the press of the coiled braids as horns and citing Sikander’s stated support for abortion rights, the organization called for a campus-wide protest “to keep the Satanic abortion idol out of Texas.” In response, the University scrapped a planned opening and artist talk, and decided not to present an accompanying video work by Sikander. There is no little irony in the situation. Witness exemplifies Sikander’s career-long effort to counter female invisibility in a world where images of female power are often seen as threatening and destabilizing. The calls to remove this proud symbol of female autonomy unintentionally underscored the reason Sikander had created it in the first place.

In between phone calls Sikander tried to put the controversy out of her mind as she donned rubber boots and an apron and proceeded with the painstaking work of spraying pigmented paper pulp over delicate stencils. Full figures, doubled figures, even closeups of the now-infamous coiled horns emerged kaleidoscopically in luminous layered compositions. During a break, Sikander mused on the complex symbolism behind Witness. Citing the visual history of Asia and Africa, she noted that similar images of braided hair can be found in early 20th-century Nigerian crest masks as well as in representations of the Buddha. And she pointed out that rams’ horns are a recurring motif in her sculptures, appearing also in NOW, a companion work that stands in front of the New York Appellate Division Courthouse. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” she remarked. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

This kind of reductive misreading is nothing new for Sikander. At the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 she was working on a mural for a law firm. She had been exploring a motif based on the Hindu goddess Durga, a female warrior embodying strength and courage, often represented by a woman whose multiple arms each bear a weapon. Sikander intended these as emblems of female protective power, but in the context of 9/11, the image was read as an incitement to violence. Not wanting to add to this confusion, Sikander withdrew from the commission.

Misreading extends as well to the way Sikander is perceived as an artist. In a career that spans three and a half decades, she has mastered painting, sculpture, animation, installation, and video. She works with glass, paper pulp, bronze, and mosaic. She juxtaposes imagery sourced from Indian court painting, Western Renaissance and Mannerist art, African tribal figures, Hindu and Persian legends, biblical narratives, and Western fairy tales. She melds figures drawn from the religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Her works deal with a multiplicity of issues, from female power to migration, trade, colonial history, and climate change. Her originality has earned her an international reputation capped by a MacArthur “genius grant,” and her retrospective is one of the official collateral events at this summer’s Venice Biennale.

Nonetheless, Sikander finds to her frustration that she is continually described as a Pakistani artist working in the neo-miniaturist tradition. “I’ve been living and working in this country for 30 years,” she said. She maintains a studio at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, but her project-based work allows her to move around. “My work is about wanting not to be boxed in to any stereotype, whether it’s on behalf of Pakistan or any culture or religion or non-white feminism or vision of tradition versus non-tradition. There are all these constraints. My desire is to escape imprisoning representations.”

THE UNFORTUNATE PIGEONHOLING OF Sikander’s work may have to do in part with the remarkable way she emerged as an artist. Born in Lahore in 1969, Sikander grew up in a multigenerational home, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. She describes herself as a quiet child, constantly drawing portraits, and enthralled by her father’s knack for storytelling. “I have memories of him enacting characters,” she said. “Reading books and giving me the idea of imagination.” Despite her love of art, she initially tried to follow a more conventional path. She received a colonial high school education at Convent of Jesus and Mary and then enrolled in the Kinnaird College for Women, where she studied math and economics in what she describes as a “waiting for marriage” culture.

But these were turbulent times in Pakistan. An erosion of women’s rights followed a coup that brought a military regime to power in 1978. Like many young women, Sikander was shaken by the changes, and took an internship with the Women’s Action Forum, an organization in the forefront of resistance to the regime. The group’s founder and Sikander’s mentor there, Lala Rukh, encouraged her to enroll in the National College of Art (NCA). “In that military environment, the art school was suspect,” Sikander said. “It had historically been full of thinkers and dissent. And it was [close to] 50 [percent] … female. It was so wonderful to be able to go there.”

At the NCA, Sikander could have followed the path taken by many of her fellow students who were looking at Western models of modernist art. Instead, she chose to immerse herself in the Mughal tradition of miniature painting. It was a surprising choice: At NCA, miniature painting was considered hopelessly retrograde. The Mughal Empire had dominated South Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries, spurring the spread of a signature art form composed of small jewel-like paintings of Mughal life and mythology. But by the 20th century, actual examples of such paintings were hard to come by in Pakistan, as the original manuscripts in which they appeared had been plundered, divided up, and sent to Western institutions. Further, works that carried on that tradition were considered tourist kitsch or dismissed as exercises in nostalgia. Even the term miniature painting was a catchall colonial construct, sweeping numerous artistic traditions under a single label. At NCA, miniature painting was seen as a dying art with little connection to the progressive agenda of an institution that was emerging as the premier art school in the country.

And that was exactly why Sikander found it interesting. She elected to work with Bashir Ahmed, a skilled miniaturist dedicated to preserving this disappearing tradition. “It was an attempt to engage with art historical visual traditions that were not the norm,” she said. “It was about looking at the pre-colonial era, looking at Safavid style, looking at Chinese history and Chinese scroll paintings, all kinds of things that were not necessarily in the books that we were studying.” Miniature painting was an outlier, and so in many ways was the teenage Sikander, a young woman driven to be an artist in a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian culture.

Sikander mixed paints from pigments, used tea stains, and learned the laborious process of painting with single-hair brushes to delineate tiny details. She spent 14 hours a day for two years completing her thesis project, imperiling her physical and mental health as she developed symptoms related to stress, prolonged sitting, and exposure to various chemicals. Although the thesis mandate was to create a series of notebook-size paintings, she employed the miniature technique to produce a single five-foot-long painting that she describes as an “epic poem.” Titled Scroll (1989–90), it unveils a panoramic view of an upperclass Pakistani home that has been opened up and spread out so that the rooms form a series of vignettes of domestic life. It is highly detailed, with a complex geometry that echoes the shifting perspectives in traditional Mughal painting. What ties it all together is the figure of a young woman in white, always seen from the back, who drifts through the house without ever actually interacting with the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. In the very last scene, she ends up outside in the garden where she stands before an easel painting a portrait of a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sikander. The figure is a bit of a cypher, guiding us through the complicated spaces, acting in part as the viewer’s eye. “It’s not necessarily a self-portrait,” Sikander said, “but at the age of 17 or 18, what else could it be?”

Scroll created a sensation, and Sikander won national attention as well as the NCA’s highest merit award. This acclaim encouraged the school to greatly expand its miniaturist program and helped spawn what is now known as the Pakistani neo-miniaturist school of art. But Sikander herself refused to see herself simply as a neo-miniaturist. “Even from the beginning I was experimenting with the miniature,” she said. “Once I had painted it, I would disrupt it, sometimes by pouring water or putting it under the tap or thinking of ways to intentionally disrupt its preciousness.” It was a traditional form that would be a continuing reference point for Sikander’s work even as she engaged in a restless, relentless experimentation with materials, and a desire to engage with a multitude of themes.

SCROLL ANTICIPATES MANY OF Sikander’s continuing concerns: It describes a female space, it highlights class and gender disparities, it is imbued with a sense of mystery, and it presents a fluid conception of time and space. But to discover her mature language, Sikander had to leave Pakistan for the United States. The spark was the unexpected perception of herself as an Other. In 1993 she enrolled in the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. It was a moment in the American art world when multicultural differences were being simultaneously fetishized and marginalized. Sikander recalled how a professor asked, “are you here to make East meet West?”

Her frustration with this narrow conception led Sikander to experiment with radically different imagery. “Certain forms started springing out, perhaps resisting this racial straitjacket,” she said. “But they were also kind of androgynous, not necessarily fully female.” This was in part a reaction to how art from her region was depicted. “Here I am looking at these big coffee table books on Islamic art or Indian art. And in there are these shadowless representations of different native cultures. These little characters are supposedly defining what I do, or who I may be, or what my work is about. They looked like they needed to escape those pages. So I started imagining them as little monsters that are going to walk off that page. And if they were, if they had little legs, or if they were going to literally crawl off, then what would they look like?”

The answer was the beginning of a lexicon of images that recur throughout her work. There is, for instance, the headless woman whose legs have become a tangle of roots. Sikander describes her as an emblem of the erasure of the feminine from religion and history. There are the flying gopi hairpieces, small winglike objects that have become detached from the heads of the female followers of Krishna. They become agents of disintegration and re-creation as they spin off like swarms of insects or birds. There are wheels of spinning arms that expand and multiply. There are androgynous creatures, like the veiled figure who confounds gender expectations by taking on the body of a male polo player.

Sikander’s explorations were aided by her reading of feminist writers and poets like Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Julia Kristeva, and South Asian thinkers like Kishwar Naheed, Parveen Shakir, and Fatema Mernissi. She remarks, “I have gravitated often to the literary space, because when we think of the representation of female protagonists, we think, who gets to write the stories? How do women themselves want to be represented?”

After graduating from RISD, Sikander secured a two-year fellowship with the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Ironically, given the current controversy over Witness, she credits her time there with opening her eyes to the diversity of America and to the connections between different histories. “Houston was so different from Providence,” she said. “Houston had Arab American diaspora histories, it had the large Indonesian Vietnamese communities, and it had a large South Asian community. So there was all these multiple spaces, but they don’t necessarily come together.” She began to draw parallels between the apparently different histories of displacement and migration that characterized the American South and her native South Asia. “It was really magical,” she said. “I was thinking how it was so foreign and so familiar at the same time.”

AN INVIDATION TO THE 1997 Whitney Biennial and a show at the nonprofit Artists Space brought Sikander to New York, where she has lived ever since. In the intervening years she has created a body of work that is breathtaking in its complexity and breadth. There are jewel-like paintings like Pleasure Pillars, 2001, her first work showing rams’ horns. Here, the horned woman is quite obviously a self-portrait surrounded by female figures from various Eastern and Western traditions. In an acknowledgment of the violence of 9/11, a tiny fighter jet approaches from the distance while a winged creature shoots fire from its hands. There are works created from ink stains that bleed into translucent tracing paper to create silhouettes of headless women. There are glowing mosaics that splinter the dresses of female figures into hundreds of shards of light and color. There is a multiscreen video titled Reckoning that flashed over Times Square every night at midnight for the month of September 2023.

Among Sikander’s explorations in sculpture are large public figures like Witness and its companion work, NOW, and smaller ones like Promiscuous Intimacies, which grew from a painting with the same motif. Both Intimacies and its inspiration envision the meeting of different traditions through the sensuous entwining of a truncated temple sculpture of an Indian celestial dancer and the twisting Venus of 16th-century Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino.

Sikander’s animations include SpiNN (2003), a critique of cable news in which an Indian ruler in a grand Mughal gathering hall is obliterated by flying gopi hair, and The Last Post (2010), which similarly disrupts the figure of a colonial-era East India company man. The monumental Parallax, created for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, is a mesmerizing immersive panoramic video that reflects on the role of migrant labor, oil, and violence in the tortured history of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow ocean passage between Oman and Iran.

One thing that unites these works is Sikander’s tendency to circle back, to rework previous motifs and allow them to absorb new meanings. Another is her focus on the disruption of fixed polarities like male and female, East and West, past and present, order and chaos. Collective Behavior, the retrospective currently on view in Venice, showcases all these aspects of Sikander’s work; it is organized by two Ohio-based curators: Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Emily Liebert, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Following its presentation in Venice, Collective Behavior will move to the curators’ respective institutions, where it will take a somewhat unconventional course. At Cincinnati, it will be fleshed out with other works, while simultaneously in Cleveland, related works will feature in dialogue with the museum’s storied South Asian collection.

Cameron has worked with Sikander on a number of projects, beginning in 2016 with the animation of an 18th-century North Indian manuscript at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She wants the exhibition to highlight Sikander’s ability to weave together diverse histories and traditions in ways that illuminate current dilemmas. “This is a really turbulent time,” she said. “Shahzia uses art to activate so many messages and to make it the center point for the conversations that we’re having, whether it’s gender and body politics or the histories of colonial India and South Asia. She reinforces this idea that art can be a catalyst for change.”

Liebert concurs. “Her art reflects on so many of the pressing issues of our time: gender relations, migration, climate, race. But she’s always thinking about those through the lens of history,” she said, adding that “in Shahzia’s work, there’s a suggestion that the past can inform our understanding of the present.”

For Sikander, the chance to present her work in Venice offers a remarkable synergy. She points to the history of Venice as a commercial and artistic center at the nexus of global trade. “When you’re in Venice, you can see forms that are understood as Venetian, but you can often see them as well in Islamic patterning,” she said. “There is this rich history of trade between Venice and Persia or China. It’s reverberating through the Italian Renaissance painting, the illuminated manuscripts of central South Asia, and the textiles in the Islamic world. But very rarely do you see this acknowledged, even in art history.” Once again, the notion of place—who belongs where, and how people define themselves—plays a role in her work. She added with a glimmer of mirth, “I think appearing in Venice is an amusing thing for an artist like myself. There are a lot of parallels that I can recognize. I guess what I’m trying to say is, for me, it’s a perfect location.”

Before the Biennale opened in April, Art in America visited the artist in his studio, a spacious workshop teeming at the time with some 20 studio assistants in a former schoolhouse near Hudson, New York. While he primed a canvas and examined other works in various stages of preparation, Gibson talked about the allure of painting, his interest in the history and intricacy of beadwork, and advice he offers to aspiring artists looking to make their mark. Watch Gibson in his studio in the video above, and read more about him in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Andy Battaglia

A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson had garnered attention with a couple small solo shows in New York and a pair of notable group exhibitions that followed. But his status was a matter of perspective. “I felt very emerging at that point,” Gibson recalled. “But because the Native art world and the larger art world were so separate at the time, I think most of my peers who were non-Native were unaware. It was like I was at different stages in different contexts.”

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Venice Biennale Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Painting and Paying Tribute to Indigenous Cultural Legacies

He was reminiscing from a very different vantage this past winter, just six weeks out from unveiling his United States Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the first time an Indigenous artist has represented America with a solo show at the illustrious affair. He was not holed up in a New York City studio but splayed out in an enormous converted schoolhouse in Hudson, an Upstate outpost that has been his home since 2012. His art for the Venice show had already shipped, but his team of some 20 studio assistants was occupied with works in various stages of creation: radiant paintings, dynamic sculptures, glamorous costumes, and dazzling ornamentation based in beads.

However far removed from his early years, it had not been all that long since a younger Gibson wandered around the Biennale wondering what might lie ahead of him. “As a struggling young artist in New York City, you don’t know how to know if anyone even cares. I had been to the Biennale when I was in grad school, but this was my first time there with any access to anything, and it was really important to feel included,” he recalled of that 2007 trip.

Kathleen Ash-Milby, a Navajo curator who was also then on the rise, had invited Gibson to Venice to see an event she organized via the NMAI for Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho), an artist 17 years Gibson’s senior. “I remember Edgar naming the Indigenous people who had died while traveling in Europe on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show,” Gibson said of the cowboys-and-Indians spectacle that toured overseas around the turn of the 20th century. “That was very significant for me.”

He also remembered meeting other Indigenous artists who would become allies and, especially, forging an important bond with Ash-Milby, who would play an important role in his being awarded the US Pavilion close to two decades later. Ash-Milby said she recalled some wild speculative dreaming about such a fate, “which at the time seemed like an insane idea.”

Gibson, for his part, remembered appreciating the provocation inherent in Edgar Heap of Birds’s presentation, and feeling curious about what might happen if even more change ever came: “I think we both kind of felt like, Is this the beginning of something—something that hasn’t happened?”

GIBSON WAS BORN IN 1972 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but grew up as a citizen of the world. With extended family in Mississippi and Oklahoma, he moved around while his father worked different jobs as a civil engineer for the US Department of Defense. He lived in Germany before elementary school and then spent time in New Jersey before relocating in his early teens to South Korea in 1985.

“Korea was impactful for me, partially because I was paying attention more independently to popular culture as it was being funneled abroad,” Gibson said. “This is when MTV was big, and there was street culture and an art scene in New York City that was being shown through music and fashion. There was one hour of MTV at midnight, and we would all talk about it, because we were jonesing.”

Formative discoveries at the time included Culture Club and Wham!, two pop acts that signaled an interest in music and identification with queer culture that figure in his art decades later. Other discoveries helped develop a capacity for cultural versatility, then and now. “When I was a kid, I romantically identified as a nomad,” Gibson said. “Living abroad and being American was an empowered and privileged place to be. But when I would come back to the US, I would be reminded that I was a person of color, and that we didn’t have as much money as it felt like we had when we were abroad. What I would bring back with me was a sense that I had traveled and seen other things. It made me feel like I knew there was a huge world. Being aware of other cultures certainly helped inform my general aesthetic and understanding of difference.”

While living overseas, Gibson returned to the US regularly, around once or twice a year, to visit relatives—and commune with histories and heritages that figured in his Indigenous identity. “My experience is a 20th-century Native American experience, and the idea that there’s any line between what is or isn’t a ‘Native American experience’ is blurry,” he said. “It’s problematic when we think about Native American heritages, especially in the 20th century, because they’re all so unique.”

Poverty and racism were issues for both the Choctaw and Cherokee sides of his family, but their circumstances differed significantly—and developed differently over time. In Mississippi, the longtime chief of the Choctaw tribe during Gibson’s childhood devised an economic plan that brought factory work and financial stability to the area. “By the ’90s, the tribe was one of the largest employers in the state, and it had a surplus of employment beyond our tribal population,” Gibson said. “So that’s the story of the Choctaw people, in addition to what we could talk about in terms of tribal dances, ribbon shirts, basket weaving, and the symbolism that exists there.”

In Oklahoma, where the Cherokee part of his family resided, Christianity played a role in Native American culture that clashed in certain ways with traditions that had been handed down over centuries. “Within both sides of my family—in Oklahoma and Mississippi—there were people who identified as Christian and others who continued traditional spiritual practices. I had uncles who continued doing traditional dancing and a grandmother and grandfather who established Southern Baptist churches.”

During visits to America, Gibson’s relationship with the various facets of his family complicated any easy answer to the question of how closely he identified as Indigenous. “It’s always been difficult for me to distinguish how much I am a part of a community,” he said. “I was always embraced, and because I would leave and go to Korea didn’t make me any less Choctaw. Wherever that line is, comes more from an external perspective. We never stopped being Choctaw or Cherokee. If anything, I think the subject is more how we quantify how those communities were shifting, decade by decade, throughout the entire 20th century. And that’s just for those two tribes—there are other tribes who have different narratives.”

In any case, Gibson said his relationship with Indigeneity owes to what he grew up with and what he has honed on his own over time. “I have never lived among a Native community where everyone around me was Native all the time, seven days a week,” he said. “But I also refuse to let anyone make me feel that my leaving the reservation makes me less Choctaw. It’s just not that simple.”

GIBSON WAS TRAINED AS A PAINTER, but his canvases—vibrant and geometric, with mesmerizingly colored patterns and bits of text he borrows from sources including pop songs, poems, and historical records—have increasingly become just one component of his shows. His work for the US Pavilion in Venice includes 11 paintings, nine sculptures, eight flags, two murals, and one video installation. A key feature of much of his art, including the paintings, is beadwork that glistens and gleams by way of handicraft as fine as that in haute couture.

Gibson’s facility with materials traces back to his university years in Chicago, where he moved in 1992 to study at the Art Institute. The next year, he took a side job at the Field Museum of Natural History as a research assistant working with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which since 1990 has provided for the protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. His work related to the legislation, which has grown in significance in recent years, involved processing items in the museum’s collection and showing them to tribal delegations that came through.

“Sometimes we had protocols to follow, but we didn’t always even know exactly what an object was, which brought up a lot of questions,” Gibson said. “Even though something may have had a record that said it was voluntarily sold, we would look back and see that it was sold under duress, or that the person who sold it was not necessarily in a position to do so. There were many things that were ‘collected’—or stolen—and there were things that should not be shared about what an object was or what it was used for.”

One such object was a prayer bundle, a parcel filled with spiritually significant contents that had been secreted away and wrapped in cloth or other material. “The only person who knows how to use what’s inside a prayer bundle is someone who’s been raised within ceremony to understand what it is and what to do with it,” Gibson said. “Many prayer bundles had been disassembled, and this was horrific to people who think they are never meant to be seen.” Another example was a stick that had seemed to some museum staffers to be part of a game but turned out to be imbued with other qualities. “Somebody came in and said, ‘No, you must cover that up immediately!’ It literally went from being one thing to another.”

Gibson’s work at the museum taught him about what he did and did not know, and he was energized by both. “NAGPRA is an amazing and hard-won law,” he said, “but what it really taught me was the problems of intercultural translation, language, perception, even entire worldviews. We could look at any object and there are going to be differences in how we view it. That became really interesting to me.”

It also opened his eyes to materials other than paint, and roles for art that ventured beyond simple states of objecthood. He learned to sew in Chicago from a fellow Native American friend who vowed to make her own clothes, and he made a doll that wound up scrambling his value system. “It was a ragdoll figure of a blonde woman wearing a buckskin dress. The fabric I used for her body was a Southwest print,” he said, adding that inspiration had been provided by white-presenting women he’d seen at powwows wearing clothes that had clearly been bought for the occasion.

A professor at the Art Institute liked the doll and “wanted to introduce me to people who could write about it or show it, but I just shut down so quickly,” Gibson said. “For me, at the time, it felt like much less of a responsibility to make an abstract painting about paint and put it out into the world. To make something that was actually a statement with a kind of critical perspective—I wasn’t ready for that.”

He was acquainting himself with different ways to work within and around tradition, however, and ways to question what exactly constitutes tradition in Indigenous cultures that are ever-changing. “I’ve always worked intuitively with different materials, based on my experience of working with historic collections and realizing all the innovations that stepped away from what I had been taught about ‘traditional’ materials,” he said. “Even things we think of as traditional, like beads, replaced other traditions. We are innovators—this is what we do. We look around and try to think about how we can make materials into something that serves our culture or serves our community. I started to see that way of thinking as a tradition in and of itself.”

“JEFFREY SHOWS THAT ONE of the most important things about contemporary Indigenous culture is that it has a specific cultural and material inheritance, but its cultural inheritance is expressed through its materials,” said Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), a curator who first showed Gibson’s work in a show about Indigenous futurism in 2011 and, two years later, in “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada that has been credited with reshaping studies of contemporary Indigenous art. For the latter show, Gibson made two paintings on elk hide that had been treated via a process that has been largely lost to history: brain tanning.

“A lot of commercial hide production is just that—very commercialized,” Gibson said. “The animals aren’t treated with a great life. They’re not killed in a humane way. In the belief system, there are histories that are inherent to hides, and I knew I wanted a hide with a different narrative.”

After some searching, he found a hunter in Montana who still practices the craft, which involves massaging the fatty matter of an animal’s brain into a hide to soften and preserve it. The hunter had killed an elk of the kind that Gibson wanted, but winter set in before he was able to tan it, so he buried the skin in the ground to freeze for the season with a plan to exhume it in the spring. As time ticked on, though, Gibson started to get anxious. “I had a deadline coming up and I was like, ‘I really need this hide!’ I felt like such a consumer,” he remembered. “Consumer thinking trains us that we can have things when we want them. But it was all part of the narrative, and I had to give in to it.”

When he finally received the brain-tanned hides, he painted them with boldly colored diagonals that suggest a sort of abstract topography and titled them This Place I Know and Someone Great Is Gone (both 2013). “That taught me a lot about the material roots of Jeffrey’s practice and the honesty to materials that he brings forward,” Hopkins said. “Everything has a story to tell.” For his part, Gibson remembered discovering a sort of poetry in the process. “The idea behind brain tanning,” he said, “is to take the memory of the animal and put it back into the skin.”

For a 2019 residency at the New Museum in New York, Gibson learned a battery of new skills, and made his education part of the premise of an exhibition that evolved as his knowledge grew. “He talked about this thing that happens when he’s asked to do a project that is supposed to represent Indigeneity, even though it’s super-differentiated, as a generalist idea,” said Johanna Burton, who curated “The Anthropophagic Effect” as part of the New Museum’s department of education and public engagement (she is now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). “He was excited about the fact that he had to learn some of the skills he wanted to use the same way that anybody else would.”

With the idea of an Indigenous atelier in mind, Gibson brought artist Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe) from Michigan to New York to teach him and his studio staff crafts that had been practiced by Indigenous people long before the arrival of European settlers. One such craft, birchbark biting (what the Northwestern Ontario Ojibwe call mazinashkwemaganjigan), involves making patterns in tree coverings by biting into them and exposing layers and fissures within. “It’s all in the way you fold the bark and then bite it, and birchbark pieces would become patterns for embroidery and, eventually, beadwork,” Gibson said. “That came at a time when I was thinking about how Native people think about abstraction differently. It’s in many ways abstract, but it’s also so specific to the person who did the biting.”

Other newly acquired skills included porcupine quillwork and river cane basket weaving, which were useful in creating garments that voguing dancers wore in performances that activated the artworks. Gibson also made helmets with the basket weaving process, transforming it to his own ends. “It’s not Choctaw tradition to make helmets, but it is Choctaw tradition to make river cane baskets,” he said. “My goal was never to recreate what was made previously. I didn’t want to learn how to make baskets—I wanted to learn the technology of making a basket, so that I could then make sculpture.”

GIBSON’S RESOURCEFUL, RESILIENT WORK for the US Pavilion in Venice draws on his many modes of art-making that commune with traditions while also revising and redefining them in his own terms. Color is in high supply, as are allusions to struggle and perseverance. “He has been addressing the same kind of problems in different ways while looking at, respecting, and honoring the Native experience,” said Ash-Milby, the curator who has worked with Gibson from the start of his career. “Part of that is acknowledging that there have been challenges and pain. That’s part of what we carry and who we are today.”

When the idea arose to submit a proposal for the Venice Biennale, Gibson turned to a trio of supporters for help: Ash-Milby, currently the curator of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Louis Grachos, who presented a wide-ranging survey titled “The Body Electric” at SITE Sante Fe in 2022; and Abigail Winograd, an independent curator who worked with Gibson on a 2021 exhibition related to the MacArthur Fellowship Program (Gibson won a prestigious “genius grant” in 2019).

For the show with Winograd, titled “Sweet Bitter Love,” Gibson made paintings in response to stereotypical late 19th- and early 20th-century portraits of Indigenous people in the collection of Chicago’s Newberry Library, and exhibited accession cards from the Field Museum, where he had worked while a student. In his paintings, Gibson aimed to open up the historical portraits by riffing and remixing them in a manner that made them personal to him and his place in time. Part of that included attaching vintage objects—beaded barrettes, found pins, decorated belts—that he collects in part as a tribute to unnamed artists who contribute to culture in a multitude of ways.

“We know the names of the sitters in paintings, but with vintage objects, oftentimes we don’t know the names of the people who made them,” Gibson said. “Those objects are also not valued, and we don’t know how they were acquired. The collective Native American experience in the US is shaped by the unnamed and the unknown, by all of these gaps and exclusions and erasures. That’s what I wanted those pieces to speak to.”

Such vintage finds figure in many of his Venice works. A sculptural bust titled Be Some Body (2024) is affixed with a button that bears the message IF WE SETTLE FOR WHAT THEY’RE GIVING US, WE DESERVE WHAT WE GET. A painting in which diamond-shaped patterns seem to recede and pulse out into open space, WE WILL BE KNOWN FOREVER BY THE TRACKS WE LEAVE (2024) flaunts a belt buckle and bolo tie, as well as a bag embellished with lane-stitch beadwork.

Some of the work winds back to familiar forms. The hanging sculpture WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (2024)—elaborately beaded and adorned with fringe that spills onto the floor in the black, white, yellow, and red colors of the medicine wheel—revisits a series of punching bag pieces that Gibson started working on in 2010, when he found a form that evoked the anger he felt around matters of race, class, and bodily disconnection. An interactive sculpture that shares its title with that of Gibson’s pavilion as a whole—the space in which to place me (2024)—echoes a 2022 project for which he invited Indigenous people to populate empty monument pedestals in front of the Portland Art Museum.

Activation is a key component of Gibson’s practice, in which performance and pedagogy play pivotal roles. In June the Pavilion will host the Venice Indigenous Arts School, a series of public programs focused on key terminology and concepts in Indigenous arts, arranged by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. “An example would be various terms for weather that take into consideration how weather affects the whole process of making art and putting it out there,” said Mario A. Caro, director of the Institute’s studio arts MFA program, who organized the event. “Weather informs the ways in which traditional materials would be gathered and processed. And by ‘weather,’ we don’t just mean ecology or environmental issues—weather really talks about a relation between the people and the land.” Another part of the program, in October, will explore connections between Indigenous cultures in North America and around the world, in partnership with Bard College, where Gibson teaches.

With a global audience set to engage his work at the Venice Biennale, Gibson said he had charged himself with continuing to position his own past, present, and future in relation to a prism of Indigenous histories and ideas. The task has been daunting, he said. But it is also catalyzing in ways he hopes will carry over. “I don’t identify as a frontline activist,” Gibson said. “But we are all politicized for how we are seen. We are also advocating for our political selves, and those political selves are rooted in our ancestry and our heritages.”

When looking over images of his Venice works in his schoolhouse studio a few months back, Gibson paused at a large bird sculpture with rainbow-colored plumage rendered in a riotous mix of materials including glass beads, rose quartz, and metallic sequins. Its title is if there is no struggle there is no progress (2024), a quotation from a speech by Frederick Douglass, and it is one of two such birds in the Pavilion.

“They’re based in the Tuscarora tradition of beaded whimsies,” Gibson said. “The bird was one of the primary forms they used to try to appeal to Victorian tastes, but they were seen as neither Native enough nor not-Native enough. I encountered them at the Field Museum and felt very much akin to them because they’re somewhere in between all these different kinds of cultural traditions. That’s how the birds work.”  

This article appears under the title “Hide and Seek” in the Summer 2024 “Icons” issue, pp. 56–63.

As told to A.i.A. I was listening to music hunting for words to use in my work and came across this disco song, “Born to Be Alive,” by Patrick Hernandez from 1978. As a mix of different kinds of musics—and a place for LGBTQIA2S+ histories—disco was so divisive at the time. People were burning disco records with the same kind of agenda behind books being banned now. The lyrics to this song are explicitly about not only demanding to be able to be alive but also total self-affirmation that says, “I am supposed to exist.” This was a time when Latino, Black, and white people, primarily, were coming together to make a new sound and a new environment that allowed LGBTQIA2S+ communities to come together. This one-hit wonder that some people might dismiss was actually politically provocative in a way that things from a queer aesthetic—like kitsch or camp—are sometimes criticized or invalidated for having too much color.

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Beaded faces in my work started a while ago. I was thinking about when we look at prehistoric drawings, like petroglyphs, and how, when we see faces, we try to understand what they were drawing. Some people think they are gods, or spirits. Some think they are aliens. We don’t always entirely know what the images are. I was thinking about that and wondered, What does this offer me?

When I started making garments of my own, I was looking at ceremonial garments, and oftentimes there would be paintings of faces or different kinds of iconography on them. I started wondering, How do I create my own personal iconography, or my own personal symbolism? That’s when I realized it would be my own work. Us not knowing specifically what these faces were gave me license to invent a face that I didn’t really know.

By the time I came to Born to Be Alive, I got over thinking I had to work with any one particular kind of bead. The blue bead in the pupils of the eyes is a Czech bead. Those are freshwater pearls around the outside of the eyes. The teeth are all amethyst, and the nose is an arrowhead. And then the frame is made with crow beads from India. Everything else is glass beads: seed beads and pony beads. They all carry their own kind of indulgences.

The language that Native people have worked with has always been anything that is available to us. I can access that now from anywhere. 

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All the Icon artists in this issue, to a greater or lesser degree, have had to wait for the world to be truly ready for their work—in essence, to catch up with them. For Fred Eversley, it took half a century for discrimination against Black artists to fade, to enable him to produce his parabolic sculptures on a large scale. The art world had to evolve to acclaim ceramics, a medium that was often associated more with craft, before Arlene Shechet saw her artworks positioned on a global stage. Joan Snyder practiced patience until ambitious painting by women began to earn appreciation the same way that men’s did before she started to draw the attention she deserves. And Shahzia Sikander’s miniature painting awaited recognition as an avant-garde approach before she could begin to expand her practice.

In the meantime, these artists didn’t wait at all, of course: they made work, got it shown, and, slowly but surely, produced the change they hoped to see. The profiles of these artists all showcase one essential trait for iconic artists: a profound perseverance.

As we celebrate these towering figures, we mourn another: the sculptor Richard Serra, who died in March. Serra’s works were the most aggressive, imposing, and deeply memorable of the Post-Minimalists. In an Appreciation of the artist, Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, a curator at Dia Art Foundation, writes that the scale of Serra’s famous Torqued Ellipses “is more than can be fully comprehended, and their materiality attracts a kind of bodily engagement that is entirely their own.”

Finally, to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, art historian Kelly Presutti offers readers a Syllabus of lively and informative books—including recent volumes that expand the scope of the movement that changed painting forever and launched a thousand blockbusters. Study up, and you might just be ready for the latest one: “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” which runs through July 14 at the Musée d’Orsay.

FEATURES

Hide and Seek
Jeffrey Gibson puts Native American culture on poignant display in the Venice Biennale’s US Pavilion.
by Andy Battaglia

Don’t Box Her In
On the eve of a career retrospective, Shahzia Sikander continues to elude categorization.
by Eleanor Heartney

Full Circle
In 1967, Fred Eversley left a job with NASA to become an artist. Now, he’s finally realizing ideas 50 years in the making.
by Emily Watlington

Work Hard Play Hard
Eccentric sculptor Arlene Shechet makes her recalcitrant materials feel fresh and alive.
by Glenn Adamson

Painting the Roses Red
Joan Snyder’s searching canvases cast her as an uncompromising creator both in and out of control.
by Barry Schwabsky

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
An artist rues downsizing his studio, and another wanders into unwanted political territory. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Multidisciplinary creator Miranda July tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Inquiry
A Q&A with Joyce J. Scott about her pointed and playful provocations.
by Andy Battaglia

Object Lesson
An annotation of Tomashi Jackson’s Here at the Western World (Professor Windham’s Early 1970’s Classroom & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir).
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale
Italy vs. Greece—two summer vacation art destinations face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Impressionism.
by Kelly Presutti

Appreciation
A tribute to Richard Serra, a sculptor without peer.
by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

New Talent
Singaporean photographer and filmmaker Charmaine Poh confronts trade-offs between visibility and protection.
by Clara Che Wei Peh

Issues & Commentary
AI imagery is inciting widespread paranoia. Can art historians help?
by Sonja Drimmer

Spotlight
Mexican painter María Izquierdo is finally getting the attention she deserves.
by Edward J. Sullivan

Book Review
A reading of Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today.
by Emily Watlington

Cover Artist
Jeffrey Gibson talks about her artwork featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Lagos
Lagos Diary
by Emmanuel Iduma

New York
The 2024 Whitney Biennial
by Emily Watlington

“Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning”
by Jenny Wu

Metz
“Lacan, the exhibition. When art meets psychoanalysis”
by Brian Ng

Venice
“Pierre Huyghe: Liminal”
by Eleanor Heartney

Cape Town
“Esther Mahlangu: Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting”
by Nkgopoleng Moloi