Arts Alive!: Jeffrey Gibson
Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado) is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, painting, installation, video art, and performance. He is a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is half Cherokee. In his work, Gibson combines Native American traditions and materials with visuals from Modernism to explore the connections between personal identity, culture, and history and how these elements influence each other. He grew up in Germany, South Korea, and England, and in each of these multicultural environments, he found friendships and connections in the music scenes. Following this influence, song lyrics and costumes are important elements in his work, along with objects associated with Indigenous culture and ceremonies such as leather, beadwork, drums, and metal jingles. Gibson received his BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago and his MA from the Royal College of Art. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Claremont Graduate University in 2016. Gibson has received distinguished awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution), TED Foundation, and the Jerome Hill Foundation. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019. Notable solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Brooklyn Art Museum, Times Square Arts, Blanton Museum of Art, Wellin Museum of Art, The New Museum, and Denver Art Museum.
