Jeffrey Gibson, Keep on Moving

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.