Premiering at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 before opening this summer at the Broad in Tovaangar (Los Angeles), Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition the space in which to place me is an earnest attempt at reconciling the experiences of Indigenous and other oppressed peoples in the United States with the country’s professed ideals. Gibson, an enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is the first Indigenous artist to be awarded a solo exhibition in the US pavilion. The barrier-breaking show—co-organized by the first Indigenous curator and commissioner of the US pavilion, Kathleen Ash-Milby—has been widely heralded as cause for celebration, a long-awaited triumph following decades of institutional efforts advocating for greater Native American presence at the art world’s most storied international platform. Across murals, paintings, sculptures, and a video exemplary of Gibson’s distinctive visual alphabet and kaleidoscopic color palette, the space in which to place me vibrates with bold geometric designs while emanating a proud recognition of Two-Spirit identities. The hybrid presentation of Indigenous artistic traditions alongside pop-culture references successfully challenges outdated—and outright racist—assumptions about what is “authentically” Indigenous, reaffirming that Indigenous artists not only belong within the sphere of contemporary art but also uniquely contribute to its discourses on abstraction, craft, and queerness. For these reasons, the space in which to place me has rightfully received unanimous praise. Obscured by these underlying aspirations for acceptance, though, are more onerous questions regarding what one is required to politically repress, or implicitly rebuke, when chosen to represent the US on the global stage. True to its title, the exhibition crucially reveals the contradictions that arise when negotiating one’s place within a space, as opposed to critically interrogating the formation of the space itself—in this case, the settler colonial entity known as the US.
Still from She Never Dances Alone, 2020. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio.
A testament to Gibson’s conviction for championing fellow Indigenous artists, the space in which to place me is accentuated by collaborations with Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), from whose poem “Ȟe Sápa” the exhibition title is derived; the Halluci Nation and Sarah Ortegon HighWalking (Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho), whose electronic music and jingle dance compose Gibson’s nine-channel video installation, She Never Dances Alone (2020); John Little Sun Murie (Pawnee/Cree), whose beaded moccasins adorn Charles Cary Rumsey’s twentieth-century sculpture The Dying Indian (an intervention Gibson arranged for a 2020 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum which was not present in Venice); and the many unknown Native makers whose items Gibson has long collected, carefully incorporating them into his assemblages to enable their future removal and rematriation. Poetic language is also key to his relational practice. Liberal with inspirational excerpts, a series of printed flags hanging from wooden tipi poles present phrases such as EVERY BODY IS SACRED (2024) and POWERFUL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT (2024), while other works feature snippets of a speech by Frederick Douglass and lyrics by Tracy Chapman.
The exhibition’s tone oscillates between playful and deadly serious, but its most charged inclusions borrow from historical figures and documents central to the national imaginary of the US. LIBERTY WHEN IT BEGINS TO TAKE ROOT IS A PLANT OF RAPID GROWTH (2024) and THE OBLIGATION OF HONOR OF A POWERFUL NATION (2024) take their respective titles from a 1788 letter from George Washington to James Madison and a statement from Franklin D. Roosevelt regarding the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, in which the US halted the private allotment of Indigenous lands but also persuaded Native nations to forego traditional forms of governance and mimic the model of their colonizer. Both works include Native-made beadwork with American flag insignia, effectively blurring one’s assumption of which nations best uphold the stated values of “liberty” and “honor”—or perhaps suggesting these are rare instances in which US and Indigenous principles can aesthetically align. In WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (2024), the line from the US Declaration of Independence is beaded into a punching bag with colorful fringe reminiscent of American Indian Movement insignia, similarly enticing viewers to spar with the supposed validity of the titular phrase: true and self-evident to whom?
Jeffrey Gibson, BIRDS FLYING HIGH YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL, 2024. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio.
The dense layering of text, materiality, and symbolism in Gibson’s works allows for ample interpretation, yet their oppositional potential toward settler colonialism is largely thwarted by appeals to US legitimacy expressed elsewhere. Take, for example, WE WANT TO BE FREE (2024), a sculpture of a non-gendered ancestral figure wearing fringe and tin jingles from powwow regalia whose ceramic head recalls Mississippian effigy pots. The work includes beaded text naming the 1866 Civil Rights Act—a post–Civil War attempt to integrate freed slaves into the US with full citizenship rights—and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which unilaterally granted US citizenship to all Indigenous peoples. The latter, however, is especially far from a universal association with the desire to be “free.” Tribal law expert Robert Odawi Porter (Seneca) deems the legislation a “genocidal act” for how it sought to supersede claims to Native nationhood and further subsume American Indians into the US polity. Detailing how citizenship serves to reify settler borders that bisect Indigenous territory, Audra Simpson (Mohawk) notes in Mohawk Interruptus (Duke University Press, 2014), “Although the Citizenship Act may have been regarded by some Native people as an affirmation of their equal place within the United States, the act was regarded by other highly independent, self-ruling communities—such as Hopi, Onondaga, and Ahkwesáhsne—as the imposition of a foreign form of citizenship and governance.” In contrast to these allusions of US citizenship aligning with freedom, I am reminded of powerful proclamations by Malcolm X and Kanaka Maoli sovereignty leader Haunani-Kay Trask, who boldly renounced their forced status of being “American” to radicalize their audiences into comprehending the violence inherent to the US and, in turn, imagine a future free from US rule (even if necessary through guerrilla warfare, as Malcolm X advocated). Seeing WE WANT TO BE FREE in Los Angeles at a time when ICE raids in immigrant and racialized communities were terrorizing the city, I was exceedingly sensitive to how US citizenship will always be a weaponized threat leveraged against the colonized, one’s legal status notwithstanding. Instead of staging a confrontation between different possibilities of citizenship, the freedom dreams of Gibson’s ancestral figure remain entrapped by the legal confines of the US settler state.
Jeffrey Gibson, WE WANT TO BE FREE, 2024. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photo by: Max Yawney.
These contentious references to the US project call into question the broader political framework in which the space in which to place me operates. Rather than examining how varying processes of exclusion and inclusion have repeatedly been used to consolidate US settler colonialism, Gibson selectively acknowledges triumphant moments in which the country’s claims of equality, justice, and freedom have been realized through civil rights, voting rights, and—as evoked in THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE (2024)—First Amendment rights. This rights-based focus of the space in which to place me repeatedly steers viewers away from a concentrated analysis of the US’s structural foundations. For instance, the painting THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT FAR TOO FREQUENTLY GOES BACK TO THE RESERVATION AND FALLS INTO THE OLD CUSTOM OF LETTING HIS HAIR GROW LONG (2024) is thematically positioned near the sculptural bust I’M A NATURAL MAN (2024), whose long ribbon hair flows freely. This juxtaposition risks diverting the intended focus of the former work from the government-sponsored practice of forced educational assimilation to white culture (“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” as US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt implored) to an affront on Indigenous self-expression, rectifiable by individual pride and defiance.
Jeffrey Gibson, THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT FAR TOO FREQUENTLY GOES BACK TO THE RESERVATION AND FALLS INTO THE OLD
CUSTOM OF LETTING HIS HAIR GROW LONG, 2024. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photo by: Max Yawney.
Historical hypocrisies are thus made into moments of sincere personal shortcomings rather than situated as forms of systemic oppression essential to the construction of the world’s most merciless imperialist machine. While the US unabashedly appropriates names of Indigenous leaders and nations for its military missions at “home” and abroad—“Geronimo” as code word for the operation to kill Osama bin Laden; Chinook, Apache, and Black Hawk helicopters—the appropriation of US history by Gibson (whose father worked for the US Department of Defense) more readily functions as a redemption of the US than outright condemnation. As the exhibition seemingly suggests, George Washington’s belief in “liberty” is not a groundless fallacy—despite his ownership of enslaved people or his nickname “Town Destroyer,” bestowed by the Haudenosaunee—but an ideal still possible for the US to fulfill, if only it were less reluctant to expand its privileges. In contrast to how easily these citations can be spun into colonial apologia, Gibson could have employed countless sources, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act or the 1887 Dawes Act, to convey a material understanding of Indigenous genocide and settler colonial dispossession as part and parcel of the ongoing US project. As it were, visitors unfamiliar with an anticolonial outlook leave the exhibition with a sense of the US as a deeply flawed nation, but one that always manifests a saving grace through instruments fundamental to its genesis, no matter how contrived they may be.
Jeffrey Gibson, The Enforcer, 2024. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photo by: Max Yawney.
Gibson’s forgiving approach is further problematized by the geopolitical context in which the exhibition opened in Venice. During the first week of the Biennale, the anonymous group Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) organized an action in the forecourt of the US pavilion, where Gibson’s sculpture the space in which to place me, comprised of plinths and pedestals of various heights, was installed. Activating the work as others gathered in front of the neighboring Israel pavilion, protestors spoke out against the concerted genocide both countries are committing against Palestinians in Gaza. Some stood atop Gibson’s work holding a keffiyeh—the Palestinian scarf with patterns representing olive leaves, fishing nets, and trade routes that is a global symbol of anticolonial resistance—while the crowd chanted about another US representative: “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” The sight of anti-genocide protestors commandeering Gibson’s all-red sculpture, with the building’s red facade serving as backdrop, fittingly recast the neoclassical pavilion into a receptacle of blood spilled by US empire. In the following days, members from Oklahoma Fancy Dancers and Colorado Inter-Tribal Dancers performed a jingle dance on the same sculpture as part of the Biennale’s opening ceremonies, illuminating a potential fissure between invited presence and unwelcome protest. When compared to the problematic ambiguity of Gibson’s exhibition as a whole, the incisive critiques offered by ANGA more adequately exemplified an aesthetics of anticolonial refusal. This sculpture’s absence at the Broad (the sole work from Venice not included despite being the exhibition’s namesake) only amplified an already striking silence on revolutionary politics.
Notwithstanding the initial protests in front of the US pavilion, ANGA’s sustained demand of “no genocide pavilion at the Venice Biennale” was limited only to Israel’s participation. Yet, as many scholars have made clear, US settler colonialism and Zionist settler colonialism—emboldened as it is by US imperialism—have long been inseparable. “While it might be hyperbolic to say that all Indigenous peoples will have to be liberated simultaneously,” Palestinian academic Steven Salaita asserts in Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine, “it can be observed that a discrete power structure, of which the United States and Israel are primary stewards and beneficiaries, maintains their dispossession.” To my knowledge, Gibson has not spoken publicly about the unplanned appropriation of his work by ANGA, nor commented on what it meant to represent the US when it was (and still is) guilty of perpetuating genocidal acts against Indigenous peoples on multiple continents. While the artist selected for the Israel pavilion opted not to open her exhibition to the public (a decision undoubtedly made out of self-preservation rather than actual solidarity with Palestinians), the same scrutiny has not been leveled at Gibson’s decision to carry on with an exhibition sponsored by the US Department of State, whose then Secretary Antony Blinken—deemed by some as the “butcher of Gaza”—excused US-funded atrocities on a near-daily basis. If Gibson’s presence rendered the US’s participation at the Biennale less applicable to direct boycott, then the pavilion functioned precisely as desired by the State Department: strategic cultural diplomacy as a form of counterinsurgency. This spatial complicity could be condoned if it were combated by more explicitly antagonistic work. Instead, the oft-repeated claims around the exhibition being empowering, inclusive, and healing have indeed proven to be true, but in a recuperative manner that absolves the US from the histories and futures present, inside the pavilion and out.
