Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer

The first major museum exhibition of contemporary artist Jeffrey Gibson, Like a Hammer presents a significant selection of the prolific artist’s evocative and meticulous works created since 2011. Blending traditional elements of Native American art with contemporary art and popular culture references, the 65 works on view include geometric paintings on rawhide and canvas, a significant number of works from Gibson’s beaded punching-bag series, large and mid-sized sculpture, wall hangings, video, and multi-media installations.

A contemporary artist of both Choctaw and Cherokee descent, Gibson’s art draws on his Native heritage and reflects his own multi-faceted, multi-cultural identity. “It’s important for me to find the places where I’m not looking to adhere to cultural definitions around what it means to be Indigenous. Instead I’m looking to provoke an awareness of how meaning shifts from one context to another,” Gibson states. In his work, traditional Native items and materials, such as glass beads, drums, trade blankets, and metal jingles used to decorate powwow regalia coexist with elements of modernist abstraction, minimalism, and pattern and decoration. Utilizing bold patterns, bright colors, and painstaking detail, Gibson creates a unique and pervasive visual vocabulary.

Words play an important role in Gibson's work. Lines from poems, his own writing, and song lyrics take on new meaning within the diverse inspirations in Like a Hammer. The text referenced above is Gibson's original writing and is a statement at once specific and inclusive, much like the artwork that it is embroidered into.

Gibson draws from his work as a research assistant in the 1990s upholding the Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a law that enforces the return of human remains, grave offerings, and sacred objects. This sparked his life-long exploration of the colonial and post-colonial mindset and an interest in the value and cultural significance of objects and rituals. Since then he has been weaving contemporary alternative subcultures and historical tribal traditions into a vast array of artistic mediums.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

Whether or not you go, the accompanying book, Jeffrey Gibson: Like A Hammer, features work from the past decade by one of America's most prominent contemporary artists. 
A citizen of the Mississippi Choctaw Nation and part Cherokee, Jeffrey Gibson spent time in Germany, England, and Korea in his youth. This mix of cultures informs much of his work, which combines elements from historical and contemporary Native arts and traditions, such as powwow regalia and the use of animal skins, with those from the artistic traditions of Modernism, Geometric Abstraction, and Minimalism. 

As a gay Native artist, Gibson explores in his work issues of oppression and civil rights in America, as well as universal ideas of love, community, strength, vulnerability, and survival. This magnificent volume focuses on nearly 60 works completed in the last decade, including culturally adorned punching bags, three-dimensional figurative works, text-based wall hangings, painted works on rawhide and canvas, and light and video works.

Add this book to your library: Jeffrey Gibson: Like A Hammer