Whitney Biennial 2019

Jeffrey Gibson: The very beginning of the garments is really my working with materials from the powwow circuit and from vendors selling to dancers and makers within the powwow context. Powwow is someplace where as much as there is a kind of collective sense of community there is also the individual that shines. That inspired me to look for other representations of modernity within Indigenous cultures.

[In] the Ghost Dance movement, the members would wear these shirts, which were self-made. It was a pacifist movement. It was based in a kind of ceremonial cleansing, dancing, drumming, as a way to bring strength back to the community and also to resist colonialism. 

It really impressed me that people would believe that this garment could protect them. And the subject isn't really about whether that's true or not. The subject for me is about—could I potentially have that belief? What is it about our contemporary society that doesn't allow me to believe that the making of an object can bring protection? 

Jeffrey Gibson: For the lobby, I am making a new textile-based piece.

Narrator: Artist Jeffrey Gibson. 

Jeffrey Gibson: It references a flag, the American flag. There’s thirteen stripes, there’s a top, left-handed panel, and it's made from textiles that I've designed. Those designs originated for a performance for the National Portrait Gallery, with the idea of naming different kinds of events and actions made by individuals who have both frustrated me, angered me, [and] inspired me, on a national level.

The very first one that really inspired it was the testimony of Dr. Ford. And the name of her event for me was She Speaks Up To Take Them Down.

It's a flag that uses a number of different pronouns. It addresses Queer, Trans communities, feminist histories, the idea of chosen family, chosen identities, and remixes these words into a flag that is quite large. 

I wasn't raised traditionally, and I wasn't raised within even a predominantly Native community. So my relationship to indigeneity is really a shared one in many ways. And then of course I have my family, and I have the tribes that I'm affiliated with, being Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee in Oklahoma.

It's based on the identities that I don't see being celebrated at a national level. Having identified, or having been identified as a minority, as a peripheral culture, as not having been acknowledged in many parts of the United States, I also wanted to extend that to other people who I see in similar situations by acknowledging them in this flag.