In April, Art in America visited Sikander at Pace Paper Studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she was preparing a new series of works on paper after sending other pieces off to the Palazzo Van Axel in Venice, where her retrospective is currently on view. While she added layers to artworks in various stages of preparation, Sikander talked about distilling ideas from around the globe, drawing as a navigational tool, and engaging history without glorifying it. Watch Sikander at work in the video above, and read more about her in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Eleanor Heartney

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In Houston, Witness drew the ire of Texas Right to Life, an anti-choice Christian group. Picking up on a description in the press of the coiled braids as horns and citing Sikander’s stated support for abortion rights, the organization called for a campus-wide protest “to keep the Satanic abortion idol out of Texas.” In response, the University scrapped a planned opening and artist talk, and decided not to present an accompanying video work by Sikander. There is no little irony in the situation. Witness exemplifies Sikander’s career-long effort to counter female invisibility in a world where images of female power are often seen as threatening and destabilizing. The calls to remove this proud symbol of female autonomy unintentionally underscored the reason Sikander had created it in the first place.

In between phone calls Sikander tried to put the controversy out of her mind as she donned rubber boots and an apron and proceeded with the painstaking work of spraying pigmented paper pulp over delicate stencils. Full figures, doubled figures, even closeups of the now-infamous coiled horns emerged kaleidoscopically in luminous layered compositions. During a break, Sikander mused on the complex symbolism behind Witness. Citing the visual history of Asia and Africa, she noted that similar images of braided hair can be found in early 20th-century Nigerian crest masks as well as in representations of the Buddha. And she pointed out that rams’ horns are a recurring motif in her sculptures, appearing also in NOW, a companion work that stands in front of the New York Appellate Division Courthouse. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” she remarked. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

This kind of reductive misreading is nothing new for Sikander. At the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 she was working on a mural for a law firm. She had been exploring a motif based on the Hindu goddess Durga, a female warrior embodying strength and courage, often represented by a woman whose multiple arms each bear a weapon. Sikander intended these as emblems of female protective power, but in the context of 9/11, the image was read as an incitement to violence. Not wanting to add to this confusion, Sikander withdrew from the commission.

Misreading extends as well to the way Sikander is perceived as an artist. In a career that spans three and a half decades, she has mastered painting, sculpture, animation, installation, and video. She works with glass, paper pulp, bronze, and mosaic. She juxtaposes imagery sourced from Indian court painting, Western Renaissance and Mannerist art, African tribal figures, Hindu and Persian legends, biblical narratives, and Western fairy tales. She melds figures drawn from the religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Her works deal with a multiplicity of issues, from female power to migration, trade, colonial history, and climate change. Her originality has earned her an international reputation capped by a MacArthur “genius grant,” and her retrospective is one of the official collateral events at this summer’s Venice Biennale.

Nonetheless, Sikander finds to her frustration that she is continually described as a Pakistani artist working in the neo-miniaturist tradition. “I’ve been living and working in this country for 30 years,” she said. She maintains a studio at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, but her project-based work allows her to move around. “My work is about wanting not to be boxed in to any stereotype, whether it’s on behalf of Pakistan or any culture or religion or non-white feminism or vision of tradition versus non-tradition. There are all these constraints. My desire is to escape imprisoning representations.”

THE UNFORTUNATE PIGEONHOLING OF Sikander’s work may have to do in part with the remarkable way she emerged as an artist. Born in Lahore in 1969, Sikander grew up in a multigenerational home, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. She describes herself as a quiet child, constantly drawing portraits, and enthralled by her father’s knack for storytelling. “I have memories of him enacting characters,” she said. “Reading books and giving me the idea of imagination.” Despite her love of art, she initially tried to follow a more conventional path. She received a colonial high school education at Convent of Jesus and Mary and then enrolled in the Kinnaird College for Women, where she studied math and economics in what she describes as a “waiting for marriage” culture.

But these were turbulent times in Pakistan. An erosion of women’s rights followed a coup that brought a military regime to power in 1978. Like many young women, Sikander was shaken by the changes, and took an internship with the Women’s Action Forum, an organization in the forefront of resistance to the regime. The group’s founder and Sikander’s mentor there, Lala Rukh, encouraged her to enroll in the National College of Art (NCA). “In that military environment, the art school was suspect,” Sikander said. “It had historically been full of thinkers and dissent. And it was [close to] 50 [percent] … female. It was so wonderful to be able to go there.”

At the NCA, Sikander could have followed the path taken by many of her fellow students who were looking at Western models of modernist art. Instead, she chose to immerse herself in the Mughal tradition of miniature painting. It was a surprising choice: At NCA, miniature painting was considered hopelessly retrograde. The Mughal Empire had dominated South Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries, spurring the spread of a signature art form composed of small jewel-like paintings of Mughal life and mythology. But by the 20th century, actual examples of such paintings were hard to come by in Pakistan, as the original manuscripts in which they appeared had been plundered, divided up, and sent to Western institutions. Further, works that carried on that tradition were considered tourist kitsch or dismissed as exercises in nostalgia. Even the term miniature painting was a catchall colonial construct, sweeping numerous artistic traditions under a single label. At NCA, miniature painting was seen as a dying art with little connection to the progressive agenda of an institution that was emerging as the premier art school in the country.

And that was exactly why Sikander found it interesting. She elected to work with Bashir Ahmed, a skilled miniaturist dedicated to preserving this disappearing tradition. “It was an attempt to engage with art historical visual traditions that were not the norm,” she said. “It was about looking at the pre-colonial era, looking at Safavid style, looking at Chinese history and Chinese scroll paintings, all kinds of things that were not necessarily in the books that we were studying.” Miniature painting was an outlier, and so in many ways was the teenage Sikander, a young woman driven to be an artist in a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian culture.

Sikander mixed paints from pigments, used tea stains, and learned the laborious process of painting with single-hair brushes to delineate tiny details. She spent 14 hours a day for two years completing her thesis project, imperiling her physical and mental health as she developed symptoms related to stress, prolonged sitting, and exposure to various chemicals. Although the thesis mandate was to create a series of notebook-size paintings, she employed the miniature technique to produce a single five-foot-long painting that she describes as an “epic poem.” Titled Scroll (1989–90), it unveils a panoramic view of an upperclass Pakistani home that has been opened up and spread out so that the rooms form a series of vignettes of domestic life. It is highly detailed, with a complex geometry that echoes the shifting perspectives in traditional Mughal painting. What ties it all together is the figure of a young woman in white, always seen from the back, who drifts through the house without ever actually interacting with the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. In the very last scene, she ends up outside in the garden where she stands before an easel painting a portrait of a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sikander. The figure is a bit of a cypher, guiding us through the complicated spaces, acting in part as the viewer’s eye. “It’s not necessarily a self-portrait,” Sikander said, “but at the age of 17 or 18, what else could it be?”

Scroll created a sensation, and Sikander won national attention as well as the NCA’s highest merit award. This acclaim encouraged the school to greatly expand its miniaturist program and helped spawn what is now known as the Pakistani neo-miniaturist school of art. But Sikander herself refused to see herself simply as a neo-miniaturist. “Even from the beginning I was experimenting with the miniature,” she said. “Once I had painted it, I would disrupt it, sometimes by pouring water or putting it under the tap or thinking of ways to intentionally disrupt its preciousness.” It was a traditional form that would be a continuing reference point for Sikander’s work even as she engaged in a restless, relentless experimentation with materials, and a desire to engage with a multitude of themes.

SCROLL ANTICIPATES MANY OF Sikander’s continuing concerns: It describes a female space, it highlights class and gender disparities, it is imbued with a sense of mystery, and it presents a fluid conception of time and space. But to discover her mature language, Sikander had to leave Pakistan for the United States. The spark was the unexpected perception of herself as an Other. In 1993 she enrolled in the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. It was a moment in the American art world when multicultural differences were being simultaneously fetishized and marginalized. Sikander recalled how a professor asked, “are you here to make East meet West?”

Her frustration with this narrow conception led Sikander to experiment with radically different imagery. “Certain forms started springing out, perhaps resisting this racial straitjacket,” she said. “But they were also kind of androgynous, not necessarily fully female.” This was in part a reaction to how art from her region was depicted. “Here I am looking at these big coffee table books on Islamic art or Indian art. And in there are these shadowless representations of different native cultures. These little characters are supposedly defining what I do, or who I may be, or what my work is about. They looked like they needed to escape those pages. So I started imagining them as little monsters that are going to walk off that page. And if they were, if they had little legs, or if they were going to literally crawl off, then what would they look like?”

The answer was the beginning of a lexicon of images that recur throughout her work. There is, for instance, the headless woman whose legs have become a tangle of roots. Sikander describes her as an emblem of the erasure of the feminine from religion and history. There are the flying gopi hairpieces, small winglike objects that have become detached from the heads of the female followers of Krishna. They become agents of disintegration and re-creation as they spin off like swarms of insects or birds. There are wheels of spinning arms that expand and multiply. There are androgynous creatures, like the veiled figure who confounds gender expectations by taking on the body of a male polo player.

Sikander’s explorations were aided by her reading of feminist writers and poets like Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Julia Kristeva, and South Asian thinkers like Kishwar Naheed, Parveen Shakir, and Fatema Mernissi. She remarks, “I have gravitated often to the literary space, because when we think of the representation of female protagonists, we think, who gets to write the stories? How do women themselves want to be represented?”

After graduating from RISD, Sikander secured a two-year fellowship with the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Ironically, given the current controversy over Witness, she credits her time there with opening her eyes to the diversity of America and to the connections between different histories. “Houston was so different from Providence,” she said. “Houston had Arab American diaspora histories, it had the large Indonesian Vietnamese communities, and it had a large South Asian community. So there was all these multiple spaces, but they don’t necessarily come together.” She began to draw parallels between the apparently different histories of displacement and migration that characterized the American South and her native South Asia. “It was really magical,” she said. “I was thinking how it was so foreign and so familiar at the same time.”

AN INVIDATION TO THE 1997 Whitney Biennial and a show at the nonprofit Artists Space brought Sikander to New York, where she has lived ever since. In the intervening years she has created a body of work that is breathtaking in its complexity and breadth. There are jewel-like paintings like Pleasure Pillars, 2001, her first work showing rams’ horns. Here, the horned woman is quite obviously a self-portrait surrounded by female figures from various Eastern and Western traditions. In an acknowledgment of the violence of 9/11, a tiny fighter jet approaches from the distance while a winged creature shoots fire from its hands. There are works created from ink stains that bleed into translucent tracing paper to create silhouettes of headless women. There are glowing mosaics that splinter the dresses of female figures into hundreds of shards of light and color. There is a multiscreen video titled Reckoning that flashed over Times Square every night at midnight for the month of September 2023.

Among Sikander’s explorations in sculpture are large public figures like Witness and its companion work, NOW, and smaller ones like Promiscuous Intimacies, which grew from a painting with the same motif. Both Intimacies and its inspiration envision the meeting of different traditions through the sensuous entwining of a truncated temple sculpture of an Indian celestial dancer and the twisting Venus of 16th-century Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino.

Sikander’s animations include SpiNN (2003), a critique of cable news in which an Indian ruler in a grand Mughal gathering hall is obliterated by flying gopi hair, and The Last Post (2010), which similarly disrupts the figure of a colonial-era East India company man. The monumental Parallax, created for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, is a mesmerizing immersive panoramic video that reflects on the role of migrant labor, oil, and violence in the tortured history of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow ocean passage between Oman and Iran.

One thing that unites these works is Sikander’s tendency to circle back, to rework previous motifs and allow them to absorb new meanings. Another is her focus on the disruption of fixed polarities like male and female, East and West, past and present, order and chaos. Collective Behavior, the retrospective currently on view in Venice, showcases all these aspects of Sikander’s work; it is organized by two Ohio-based curators: Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Emily Liebert, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Following its presentation in Venice, Collective Behavior will move to the curators’ respective institutions, where it will take a somewhat unconventional course. At Cincinnati, it will be fleshed out with other works, while simultaneously in Cleveland, related works will feature in dialogue with the museum’s storied South Asian collection.

Cameron has worked with Sikander on a number of projects, beginning in 2016 with the animation of an 18th-century North Indian manuscript at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She wants the exhibition to highlight Sikander’s ability to weave together diverse histories and traditions in ways that illuminate current dilemmas. “This is a really turbulent time,” she said. “Shahzia uses art to activate so many messages and to make it the center point for the conversations that we’re having, whether it’s gender and body politics or the histories of colonial India and South Asia. She reinforces this idea that art can be a catalyst for change.”

Liebert concurs. “Her art reflects on so many of the pressing issues of our time: gender relations, migration, climate, race. But she’s always thinking about those through the lens of history,” she said, adding that “in Shahzia’s work, there’s a suggestion that the past can inform our understanding of the present.”

For Sikander, the chance to present her work in Venice offers a remarkable synergy. She points to the history of Venice as a commercial and artistic center at the nexus of global trade. “When you’re in Venice, you can see forms that are understood as Venetian, but you can often see them as well in Islamic patterning,” she said. “There is this rich history of trade between Venice and Persia or China. It’s reverberating through the Italian Renaissance painting, the illuminated manuscripts of central South Asia, and the textiles in the Islamic world. But very rarely do you see this acknowledged, even in art history.” Once again, the notion of place—who belongs where, and how people define themselves—plays a role in her work. She added with a glimmer of mirth, “I think appearing in Venice is an amusing thing for an artist like myself. There are a lot of parallels that I can recognize. I guess what I’m trying to say is, for me, it’s a perfect location.”

In Melissa Cody’s 2014 weaving Good Luck, a figure known as Rainbow Man is represented as an electrical cord, his lower half culminating in a two-pronged plug. His tubular body encircles the phrase GOOD LUCK, and beneath those words, there’s a somewhat unexpected motif, formed from four right angles that meet at a central point.

Navajo viewers will understand the symbol as a whirling log, which connotes Good Luck’s titular well wishes. But to many other viewers, the symbol will likely read as a swastika. There are differences between the two symbols: a whirling log’s four angles form a square, whereas a swastika is rotated 45 degrees, creating a diamond. But those differences are subtle and easy to miss. That’s why it’s worth spending time with Cody’s whirling logs, which figure in two current New York solo shows, at MoMA PS1 and Garth Greenan Gallery.

At PS1, Navajo Transcendent (2014) shows a lone whirling log popping against a teal background. Cody rendered the ancient symbol in a pulsating pattern derived from traditional Navajo weaving that’s known as an eye dazzler: here and elsewhere, she is emphasizing the symbol’s cultural origins. In Navajo Transcendent, she has caused the sign to appear three-dimensional, rendering it with depth, as if to suggest that there are multiple vantages from which to view this symbol, both formally and culturally. Certainly, with its dazzling colors and dizzying patterns, this work contains none of the austerity or threat associated with Nazi regalia.

I’ll admit that, as a Jew, I don’t always find Cody’s works featuring this easy to take, and it seems I’m not alone in feeling that way. When I visited PS1, I overheard two visitors debating Navajo Transcendent, noting that the work is presented without a trigger warning. The institution seemed uncomfortable in its handling of the work as well. It showed the piece alongside a wall text that does not include words like “swastika” or “Nazis,” words that feel like elephants in the room. In that wall text, viewers are directed to a label for a different piece, Navajo Whirling Log, should they seek “additional context.” The text for Navajo Whirling Log notes that “misassociations with the Nazi swastika” may occur, and reminds viewers that Navajo culture “predates Nazi atrocities by millennia.” This is a fact—but so is the continued prevalence of swastikas wielded in hateful ways. It is hard not to see a Nazi symbol here.

That’s partly why, in 1940, Navajo, Papago, Apache, and Hopi leaders signed the Whirling Log Proclamation, formally agreeing to stop using the symbol. They noted that the motif had been “desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.” That excerpt appears in an explanatory text posted at Garth Greenan Gallery’s front desk, but this necessary context is mysteriously absent within PS1’s galleries. That text also states that the leaders signed the proclamation under pressure from the US government, and points out that anyway, Navajo religious practices were banned in the US until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978. In the intervening decades, Cody and other contemporary Navajo artists have endeavored to revive the whirling log, asking why one connotation should supplant another. Several have been met with protests, such as when, in 2017, a Washington art space removed works by Steven Leyba that featured whirling logs after backlash.

Cody’s whirling logs do make me uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean her works that feature them should be taken down. Her tapestry Navajo Whirling Log (2019), at PS1, features four such logs that touch their tips, forming a cross at the work’s center. The cross is a symbol for the Spider Woman who, according to Navajo tradition, wove the universe into being. Anyone who views this piece as representing four swastikas, then stops there, is likely to miss out on that rich story. Art often shows us how many signs have more than one meaning, and if we keep an open mind—and, maybe, get uncomfortable—we might learn to see things anew. 

This is the subject of a new book by art historian Claire Bishop, titled Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Bishop posits that our phones have become a kind of “prosthesis for viewing” art, and her book is about how artists are responding to this new normal.

Today, we often treat slow contemplation of a painting as a respite from the onslaught of everyday life, the museum as a rare site of reverent attention. But in her introduction, explaining her interest in attention, Bishop shows this wasn’t always so. Citing critic and historian Jonathan Crary, she writes that the very concept of “attention” emerged in the 19th century as a means of optimizing laborers at the onset of industrial capitalism. Soon, the world witnessed new methods for displaying art meant to focus that attention. By the 1870s, single rows of paintings punctuated by blank wall space replaced crowded salon-style hangs. That same decade, theatergoers began to find their seats facing the stage head-on—no longer arranged in a horseshoe shape offering views of audience and performers alike. And whereas, historically, theatergoing had been a decidedly social experience, talking to seatmates became rude. In theater as in visual art, viewing became a disciplined cognitive experience rather than a sensorial and social one.

As Bishop makes clear in her introduction, there was a classist element to all this. Gabbing peasants, unaware of the new etiquette, were snubbed. “Distraction,” Bishop writes, became “a moral judgment.” Taking this critique into the present, she takes issue with moralizing dismissals of artworks that encourage you to whip out your phone and take a picture, or look something up. It’s elitist, she says, to classify phones and TV as objects of distraction, and set aside art and opera as worthy of reverence.

The four chapters that follow were not originally intended as a book, but are rather four essays written over the course of 10 years; only later did Bishop realize they share the theme of attention. The first chapter, on research-based art‚ is the book’s most significant contribution to the field, and I say this leaving aside my feelings about her claim therein that “the genre has never been clearly defined—or, for that matter, critiqued.” (This magazine dedicated a whole issue to the subject last year, about which Bishop and I exchanged several emails.) Bishop argues that the genre is structured around ways that digital technology organizes information, and even thought: we might not remember the name of something, but we know where to look it up. She defines research-based works as relying “on text—printed or spoken—to support an abundance of materials, distributed spatially.” Typically, such works present viewers with more information than they can meaningfully consume.

For Bishop, Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93) is a formative example: with archival material on shelves and at viewing stations, visitors could research African diasporic culture, especially the reception of hip-hop in Germany. Green deliberately offered a huge quantity of information: she didn’t want her viewers to walk away feeling they had “mastered” the topic. In 1995, though, she created a CD-ROM edition, because viewers never seemed to have enough time in the museum.

Green’s decidedly post-structuralist proposition, Bishop argues, was a necessary move away from master narratives—and one that evinces digital technology’s impact on attention. But the writer is less convinced by later works of research-based art. She notes that Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center (2005–) similarly arranges articles and photographs in vitrines, all absent a grand narrative, or even an obvious theme. By the 2000s, she says, as internet use expanded, people began to feel overwhelmed by information all the time, and stopped needing artworks to reproduce that experience.

The trend of information overload took off, and viewers grew fatigued. The 2002 edition of Documenta featured more than 600 hours of video. Technically, it was possible to watch it all, if you devoted 6 hours per day to the task for all 100 days the show ran. Viewing art came to feel onerous. (If the research-based art trend was the shot, it’s not hard to see why today’s colorful painting became the chaser.) In lieu of information overload, Bishop finds herself “yearning for selection and synthesis,” and
here considers Walid Raad exemplary. Raad offers viewers compelling narrative threads in works that often concern Lebanese history, but he always makes clear his stories are one of several perspectives. There are multiple, but not infinite truths.

IT’S NOT JUST RESEARCH ART OR VIDEO ART presenting viewers with more than we can comfortably consume. Several recent major works of performance art have also done away with the idea of comprehensive viewing, and this is the subject of chapter 2. They might offer no seating, inhumane duration, and/or a looping structure so that viewers can come and go. Two examples Bishop cites are recent Golden Lion winners at the Venice Biennale: Germany’s Faust (2017), by Anne Imhof; and Lithuania’s Sun & Sea (Marina), 2019, by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė.

Sun & Sea (Marina) was a looping nonlinear opera about climate change; viewers could come and go, or simply stay and tune in and out, much as people both attend to and ignore the anthropogenic apocalypse every day. Faust, meanwhile, was a durational performance wherein hot “health goths” strike poses on a plexiglass platform that doubles as a framing device. If you weren’t in Venice that year, you probably saw it on Instagram. Here, Bishop rebuts simplistic critiques of that work as being “too Instagrammable,” effectively calling such dismissals snobby. She says the work instead reflects “a new form of hybrid spectatorship” that smart phones have produced.

But this begs a follow-up question: does Imhof tell us anything new or interesting about this spectatorship? Does merely indexing a condition make good art? One of Bishop’s more salacious arguments is one she makes matter-of-factly, and offhand: “In the twenty-first century,” she says, “works of art tend to be symptomatic of larger conditions, rather than anticipatory fortune telling.” Due to income inequality, she quickly argues, artists are no longer canaries in the coal mine. Even if I thought that characterization of recent art were true, I’d push (beg!) artists to do more than accept and reflect status quo.

Chapter 3 focuses on performance works that Bishop calls “interventions.” These works swap duration for disruption. Here, she makes a useful distinction between guerrilla interventions and institutional ones, Fred Wilsons’s Mining the Museum being the canonical example of the latter. In 1992 Wilson rehung rooms of the Maryland Historical Society with objects from the institution’s collection in a manner that lay bare the state’s history of slavery. It was a provocative piece—but rather than change the museum’s practices, the gesture, Bishop writes, “gave rise to a glut of compensatory invitations,” with institutions delegating critical gestures to artists rather than rethinking their own practices.

Bishop contrasts these interventions with guerrilla-style ones by the likes of Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei, who seized public space and attention without permission. While such works offer important political warnings, they are also symptomatic of a changing mediascape: going viral and making headlines is an important part of the strategy for works looking to generate “provocation, disruption, attention, debate.” In 2004 a member of the Yes Men went on BBC posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman to apologize for a deadly disaster the company had caused—then watched Dow’s share price plummet. What’s key here is not site specificity, as is often true for institutional gestures, but what Cuban artist Tania Bruguera calls “political-timing-specificity.”

Interventions, according to Bishop, “tend to foreground a model of authorship that heroicizes the artist … as a daring rebellious outsider.” There’s a reason, she adds, why many of the artists she cites are men: “this kind of intrepid assertion of the self in public space … privileges those who feel secure enough to penetrate that zone and claim it.” Continuing in this vein, she rebuts critics of Bruguera’s #YoTambienExijo project. Her 2014 performance involved asking Cuba to open up not only to free markets, but to free press and free speech. Because the project involved social media, it necessarily linked to an individual’s profile, even though it was a collective endeavor. Yet some complained that the project centered the artist rather than the cause. Bishop writes that such criticism is “much less frequently levelled at [Bruguera’s] male contemporaries like Ai Weiwei, who are more likely to be heroicized as dissidents,” rather than seen as attention whores.

The final chapter takes an unexpected pivot to the many artists today making work about Modernist architecture, a trend that Bishop argues is the product of the internet placing history at one’s fingertips. Such artworks are a useful case study for laying bare the many problems that artistic research can engender. In researching—or simply searching—online, it’s all too easy to strip objects from their context, and to depoliticize or romanticize them in the process. These works “produce historicity in a register of simultaneity,” Bishop writes, and produce the feeling of “everything everywhere all at once.”

Certain motifs can come to take on myriad meanings, with the “universalism” of the so-called International Style lending extra malleability. So much so that in 2009, curator Adriano Pedrosa organized a whole show of non-Brazilian artists engaging with Brazilian modernism; meanwhile, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20) has been refigured by the likes of Ai Weiwei, Michael Rakowitz, and the collective Chto Delat. Stopping just short of calling Modernist invocations cheap tricks, Bishop jabs that “mid-century modern became synonymous with grown-up good taste,” and adds that countless artists venerate modernism in “an appeal to ancestral spirits”—that its invocation automatically “lend[s] significance to the contemporary object.” Modernism already holds space in our collective attention, and artists reroute those symbols to new ends.

Somewhat unexpectedly, digital art is wholly absent from Bishop’s book: she argues that “the effects of digital technology upon spectatorship are best seen in art that, at first glance, seems to reject digital technology most forcefully.” For this reason, hers is a much more interesting and less obvious argument about the internet’s effect on art than many made by the preponderance of shows and articles in the 2010s. But the wholesale sidestepping of digital and post-internet art, as well as all the scholarship around it, still seems strange. I found myself eagerly awaiting her take on phenomena like immersive experiences—the apotheosis of blending digital viewership with traditional artworks—but it never came. Her brief mention of works by so-called post-internet artists feels cherrypicked in its focus on artists who reproduce the experience of information overload: she omits the many who warned (21st-century artists do warn!) of what was coming, for our attention span, for AI, and so on.

I suspect this omission is for one of two reasons: either Bishop didn’t consider digital art a subject worthy of attention—(would that not also be elitist, I genuinely wonder?)—or because the patched-together essays that constitute her chapters were, as Bishop acknowledges, never meant to form a master argument. Either way, ironically, I have to hand it to her: the elision proves her point.  

“It was the nullification of expression,” Accardi later said of her works from that period. Her almost calligraphic scribbles—whether arranged in neat lines or garbled into a blob—look like language. And indeed, words were on her mind. Rivolta Femminile was founded on the principle that reading and writing were valuable tools for achieving self-awareness—and in turn, for helping women disentangle their own desires from internalized expectations.

When Accardi left Rivolta Femminile in 1973, she wrote a letter to a cofounder justifying her departure—a letter she never sent. Now, an excerpt appears in the catalog for her retrospective at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, on view through June 9. In that letter, Accardi explained why she needed to leave and devote herself more fully to making art again: “The most remarkable thing I found in feminism,” she wrote, “was the discovery that I am a human being, and as such, I have no desire to deprive myself of … imaginative, utopian passions.”

The early ’70s was not the first time Accardi interrogated the relationship between aesthetics and politics so intensely that she had to press pause. A vitrine in her retrospective displays a manifesto that the Italian-born artist signed in 1947, when she was in her 20s and had just joined both the Communist Youth Federation and Forma. The latter was an artist group aligning formalism and Marxism. They believed in making art as a way to improve one’s life in a material sense, through labor, and insisted that such a vital and deeply human act shouldn’t remain the purview of the bourgeoisie. Forma’s ideas galvanized the work she produced until around 1953, when she experienced a “deep crisis.” After a yearlong hiatus, she temporarily eliminated color from her work, as she would again decades later. In so doing, she hoped to avoid becoming “distracted towards pleasantness” and “to give her painting a moral certainty,” as an exhibition pamphlet from the time reads.

The best colorful paintings in the show in Rome are from the 1960s. Accardi, who died in 2014 and liked to call her practice “anti-painting,” explained her attraction to contrasting colors: “Only through the notion of night do I know the day.” With abstraction, she wanted to dispense with the patriarchal baggage that haunted representational imagery, and to capture life’s complexities. “I simply paint a symbolic portrait of life as I see it,” she said, “with its struggles, its joys, its miseries and its defeats.” So in the ’60s, as advertisements and packaging were newly altering the visual landscape, Accardi ingested it all and responded with paintings of squiggles in dizzying hues. In Violarosso (1963), she scribbled in bright orange all over a magenta surface, nearly dissolving all distinction between foreground and background.

By 1965, Accardi was on to something totally new. She swapped canvas for Sicofoil—a clear plastic—in an effort, as she said, to “reveal the mysteries behind the art.” That material, designed for packaging, is inclined to curl, so she would sometimes let it roll into cylinders or cones, or else stretch it like a canvas on wooden bars. A room in the retrospective is dedicated to immersive pavilions she built with plexiglass and then painted on. On these clear plastics—newly introduced material at the time—bold, opaque brushstrokes appear to hover in space. There is a quiet revolution in the way Accardi’s paintings foreground the background: whether a clear substrate disappears entirely or a vibrating magenta surface refuses to recede, this supporting role is really also the protagonist. I imagine most women can relate.

Accardi cared deeply about political thought and action, but she didn’t want to fall into the trap of, well, black-and-white thinking that might cleave aesthetics from politics too neatly. For her, life encompasses both in a complex, contradictory swirl. She insisted that a rich range of experiences was her right, and in fact part of the reason she cared about Marxism and feminism in the first place: that richness made life worth living and defending.

Scott’s fluid and free-spirited work—which also includes forays into comedy, music, theater, and performance of other kinds—is on full view in “Walk a Mile in My Dreams,” a retrospective currently at the Baltimore Museum of Art through July 14. The 75-year-old artist, who has called Charm City her home since childhood, is showing some 140 works spanning more than 50 years. Below, Scott discusses her hometown history, her capacity for craft, and how she’s navigated an evolving art world over the decades.

How has Baltimore informed and guided who you are as an artist?

My parents were sharecroppers from North and South Carolina who came to the “Up South” during the Great Migration. They got to Baltimore, and it allowed them to have a bit more agency and power in their lives. This city offered them the possibility of giving me the life that I have—the ability to become a MacArthur fellow and have a 50-year retrospective.

When I was growing up, Baltimore was much more prosperous than it is now. Unfortunately, stories these days are always showing boarded houses and Black men standing on the corner, but that’s only a pittance of what the city is really about. Baltimore, for me, is a city of largesse. When you are loved in Baltimore, it’s the best. You’re in a city filled with joy, filthy with artists, and packed with angst.

Your exhibition coincides with a Baltimore Museum show devoted to your mother, the late artist Elizabeth Talford Scott, who is also being celebrated with shows at eight other museums and colleges across the city. What does it mean to you to be showing your art along with hers?

It really speaks to a Baltimore ethos, where I, as a fabulous African American woman at three-quarters of a century old, get to do this. I was like, “What the fuck?!” (I cuss a lot, and I’m trying not to.) These young curators have given such deference to my mother and know things they probably shouldn’t. When you walk through my mother’s exhibition at the Baltimore Museum, it is mounted beautifully, and you are made aware of the consummate dignity and stank—that’s not stink but stank—and regality and oomph that my mother’s work has.

What’s something your mother taught you that has stuck with you?

The voice that I hear from my mother—she talks to me all the time, that rascal—says, “You’re worthy. And if you want it, go get it. Never stop.” We used to talk about having just one life. I, who have had some infractions in this life, probably will be reborn as a bee or as a bodily fluid—as something terrible. But as long as I’m a human being, I’m running it down. She packed me full of self-awareness, self-assuredness, and the ability to know that if this is it, I’m running for it. I’m not going to stop. And that is ever present in my artwork.

Your show opens with a newly commissioned installation titled The Threads That Unite My Seat to Knowledge (2024). Why did you want to begin with that?

This is one of my cockamamie ideas. I decided to make a dwelling that represents not only me and my brain but also the cozy, comfortable environment in which I grew up and became this person. On the outside are quilts made by my mother, grandmother, grandfather, and godmother because they swaddled me in my youth and gave me a lot of love. When I dreamed, I was on a magic carpet under those things.

Inside that installation, I’m showing large beaded pieces that talk about translucency and color—and just ass-kicking. There is a chair where I might sit if I’m in the museum, and tell stories and sing and talk. My mom brought me to the Baltimore Museum when I was a kid, when [Auguste Rodin’s] Thinker was still outside. You could jump all over him and try to find his genitalia and then walk up all those steps through the front door. The museum was one of my seats of knowledge. It was a place where I could perambulate and touch things I’m not supposed to. So it’s proper and apropos—and all those words—that I should be able to sit in this joint and disperse some common knowledge.

The title of the show alludes to a performance piece of yours called Walk a Mile in My Drawers (2006). What is the significance of that work to you?

The first retrospective I did here [at the BMA in 2000] was called “Kickin’ It with the Old Masters.” It was funny because when we were talking about it, people would say, “Do you really want to say masters?” This [new title] is a way to talk about the many facets of what I do as a performer, singer, and theater person, as well as a visual artist and an educator. Walk a Mile in My Drawers was a funny bon mot about fatness, about big girls, sexuality, all that stuff. “Walk a Mile in My Dreams” is about how I shall not be denied.

I’ve been loved. I’ve been given the fodder I need, and the nourishment. Some of that was money and food, but a lot of it was that little extra kick you need to take the next step—someone imparting knowledge to me and not making me feel either stupid or wrong to ask questions. To receive that is a big deal. And I would be remiss if I didn’t include race in this, because that can make it a really arduous task to exhibit work about social and cultural stuff and also use materials that people don’t necessarily understand as art. I’m a craftsperson and an artist all rolled into one. But people bemoan me saying I’m a craftsperson. “What?! Are you going to sing a Negro spiritual?” Well, I just might! I’m overwhelmed by this retrospective because it allows me to look at how I’ve walked so many miles in my dreams—and how I continue to do that.

You’ve made so many different kinds of art over 50 years. Are you surprised by any of your work? Are there things you can barely believe you made?

It’s the amount of work. If I make 10 necklaces a year and 10 sculptures, that’s 20 pieces of art. Multiply that by 50. And that’s a low number! And while I was doing that for a long time I traveled as a performer with Kay Lawal-Muhammad as the [variety act] Thunder Thigh Revue. I look back at that and think, Who the hell is that person?! Isn’t it wonderful that I wasn’t dissuaded and didn’t succumb to my fears—that I just kept walking?

How do you remember the Thunder Thigh Revue?

This was in the mid-’80s into the ’90s, at a time when Whoopi Goldberg was golden, and people like Mort Sahl—monologuists—talked about really heavy subjects in a comedic manner. It was a real adventure. We would do bits. We realized there were things that we needed to say, and we wanted to say them in a way that the audience would actually listen. A lot of our work was about being accepted for who you are. It was about larger women, about large Black women, about immigration; anything we heard, we went after. A lot of it was about who the messenger is and listening to what that messenger has to say. Because incumbent in that was our ethnicity, our weight, our gender, our class: you name it. That was very important for us.

It was also a kind of feminism for us. But we kept our clothes on. It was different than what I see young women doing now, shaking their butts and whatever. We were very aware of who was looking at us, because the majority of the time our audience was not 50 percent Black. We were very aware of the message we were sending out and what we looked like. We were aware that some of the “demons” we were talking about were sitting in the audience and lasciviously wondering what’s under that lace bustier. One of the things we always were tackling was how not to pander to that—to be real and true and honest. That’s very relevant in my artwork as well.

In the past few years there’s been a shift in terms of attention paid to African American art. How different or the same does it feel to you now?

I talk with friends sometimes and we say, “Didn’t this happen in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, when African Americans were everything, and everybody had on kente cloth and big afros? And everybody was an Indigenous person wearing bead work and whatever was the flavor of the month?” For me the real difference is that the folks who are doing it now are not 20th-century people. They’re 21st-century people who are part of a more global society. These kids aren’t who I was. They are very different people. The abundance of knowledge and accessibility that we really had to work for in the past is at their fingertips. And there are many, many more well-educated people of color. There’s still not enough, ever. But we have great examples.

You’ve done beaded works, blown glass, and worked with all kinds of different materials. Is there one way of working with which you have a special kinship?

Beadwork. I insinuate beads into anything. If I could make an edible bead and we could sprinkle it on top of ice cream, I would bead in a beautiful design, and then we’d eat it. It is a mesmerizing technique. My mother’s side of the family were craftspeople: basket workers, clay people, weavers, all kinds of things. One of the reasons I chose beads is because I could afford them. I could carry them with me, and they weren’t toxic—unless I ate them. The more I learned about them, the more I realized I had the facility to bend them to my will. And they are my lingua franca as a teacher. They’re one of those things you can teach, and while you’re working with your hands, you can talk to people about history, about power—you can apply it to just about everything.

What made you inclined to work across so many different art forms?

I took advantage of every opportunity. I was so hungry for knowledge. If knowledge is truly cumulative, then being able to relay and pile on from the past and also unite that with what’s happening now … If I live, what the hell will I be doing in 2030? I’ll be in a wheelchair, but I’ll be rocking, baby. 

Before the Biennale opened in April, Art in America visited the artist in his studio, a spacious workshop teeming at the time with some 20 studio assistants in a former schoolhouse near Hudson, New York. While he primed a canvas and examined other works in various stages of preparation, Gibson talked about the allure of painting, his interest in the history and intricacy of beadwork, and advice he offers to aspiring artists looking to make their mark. Watch Gibson in his studio in the video above, and read more about him in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Andy Battaglia

You have a rigorous research-based art practice. How did that begin?

The earliest works in the show begin in 2014 when I was a student, with explorations into employing research-based methodology. I’ve always been asking questions and trying to visualize language and relationships. At the time, I was experimenting with researching histories of American school desegregation. In particular, I was focused on the cases that led to the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954. As a student at Yale, I had access to the law library. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the many cases of this landmark legislation. Anyone who uses interstate travel, public education, or public broadcasting is a direct beneficiary of this legislative package.

I found myself with lots of questions about public-school transportation and a long legacy of devaluing the lives of children of color and public space, as well as defunding and depriving public schools of resources after the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. I had faith that if I focus on an area of research or a particular question that something is going to come of it. I didn’t know what the work was going to look like. I didn’t know what the solution was going to be. But I just started reading the cases.

How did you become interested in public spaces and resources?

I’m from Southern California. Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I was very impacted by the prominence of murals and narratives painted in public spaces. There’s this part of me that I can’t really shake: a desire to inquire about issues of public concern and embed them into a process by which new material is produced. The first works start there.

I was exploring the perception of color and its impact on the value of life in public space. As an adult, I was able to again study Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, which I had first learned in elementary school. This work gave me an opportunity to start exploring color relationships chromatically and societally. I realized that the impact of color perception and optical illusions initiated by interactions of particular colors which make us see things that aren’t really there. I saw an echo in the case law that I was reading.

Subsequent bodies of work follow this methodology, with site-specific research on such topics as the relationship between public transportation and voting referenda in Atlanta, for example, as well as a comparison between the contemporary use of third-party transfer programs seizing paid properties and the historic property dispossession of people of color in New York. Let’s talk about some of your latest works, which were produced during an artist residency in Boulder, Colorado.

There are three new pieces in the show that use marble dust from the nearby Yule Mountain Quarry, which produced the marble for the Lincoln Memorial and most—if not all—of the great monuments in Washington D.C.

Not unlike your earlier works, you employ a rigorous material process that alludes to the history of abolition and democracy in America. How do you create these multi-layered surfaces?

Before I know what the image is going to be, I’m building a surface with material that is symbolic to me of a place in some way. The material used for Here at the Western World…, for instance, is made of a quilting liner. I spent a lot of time in southern Colorado, outside Denver in the San Luis Valley, and I made friends with people who gave me such textiles. I attached the quilt liner to a piece of raw canvas. I used paper bags, which I separate from the handles. Over many days, I soaked the paper and unfolded it carefully, before laminating it into the surfaces of the work. The pieces become kind of like animal hides that are stretched onto the wall and cured in anticipation of stretching them onto awning style frames. The surface of the piece was then encrusted with sand from southern Colorado and marble dust from the Yule quarry.

There are additional layers and images constructed on top of that surface as well.

The halftone line image that’s projected on the surface in yellow hues is an image of a particular classroom from This Is Not Who We Are (2002), a documentary film about Black communal experiences in Boulder from the 1800s to more recent years. The catalyst of the film, which questions Boulder’s standing as what some have called the happiest place to live in the U.S., is a controversy over excessive police force used against a Black student at Naropa University in 2019. I included an image from the film of Professor Wyndham’s classroom.

Printed on the pink vinyl is a still that I created of a very quick moment from 1972 home video footage of the choir from the Second Baptist church—the only black congregation in Boulder for many years—singing, which resonated with my own experiences going to church growing up in Los Angeles. These places historically in the United States and other colonized countries are where people of color gather for respite and liberation. There are these moments that happen where people are trying to get closer to freedom by gathering together for release and for mutual exaltation.

Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her former name, having exhibited in major group shows like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In 30 some paintings and mixed-media works, many of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending with her new life. We see her newly subject to the leering gaze of construction workers, and getting accosted by a white woman for using the women’s bathroom at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of the show’s best works, a 2024 canvas titled I am a work in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, painting a vision of a woman of her own making, as she now wants to be seen. Next to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming medications. Behind him a woman, the artist’s mother, dusts off one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this year, the artist began painting scenes from her transition directly onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this series is titled shot day (all works 2024); it is a tender self-portrait showing the artist injecting her abdomen with hormones. The piece, measuring just over 3 by 6 inches, is painted directly onto the flattened box of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her legal name partially visible. This work joins about a dozen other small drawings of Gomez at various stages in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of found cardboard recalls an earlier series, begun in 2013, in which Gomez painted Latinx domestic workers—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto magazine pages displaying beautiful mansions that they keep pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings up to David Hockney-esque paintings. Her objective then as now is to show those who have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Under Construction,” she gives her own process of transitioning a rare kind of visibility, carving an ideal image of herself while also grappling with how the world sees her. But she doesn’t stop there: she also honors the enormous contributions that trans women of color have made toward civil rights for queer people. These women have often been, until recently, intentionally erased from history; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans women of color that includes Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

But visibility has its downsides. Gomez confronts them in Every day I walk outside is a leap of Faith (Walking with Alok), which shows the artist in a black bra, staring in the mirror as she shaves her upper lip. Behind her, a canary flies out of a gold cage, and in one corner Gomez has kissed the canvas with a pair of a bright-red lips. In the foreground is Alok, a gender non-conforming poet and comedian who has been a mentor to Gomez during her transition. The two are surrounded by leering construction workers and signs reading ROAD CLOSED and DETOUR. There’s tension in this scene: like the overlooked laborers in their high visibility orange, Gomez and Alok appear both hyper-visible, and yet invisible, too.

That painting is untethered to any real space: instead, the figures float in a purple void. Gomez uses purples often, perhaps referencing the swirling together of the colors of the trans flag (pink, cyan, and white), or even the spectrum of hues in a bruise: a bruise at the site of hormone injection; a bruise from hemophilia, a condition Gomez has; a bruise that refers to the violence that trans women of color often face, whether from lovers, from johns, or even from catcalling construction workers.

At the back of the exhibition, there is a sculptural intervention. There, Gomez has installed a chain-link fence covered by a green tarp, with diagrams of her facial feminization and breast augmentation surgeries painted onto the surface. Surrounding these diagrams are outlines of butterflies: the ultimate symbol of transformation. A sign on the floor warns: “WERK ZONE.” Nearby, Gomez has dedicated a poem to her friend Winter Camilla Rose—also depicted in a leisurely odalisque portrait—about “a journey with no guide / with no end.”

A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson had garnered attention with a couple small solo shows in New York and a pair of notable group exhibitions that followed. But his status was a matter of perspective. “I felt very emerging at that point,” Gibson recalled. “But because the Native art world and the larger art world were so separate at the time, I think most of my peers who were non-Native were unaware. It was like I was at different stages in different contexts.”

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Video: Venice Biennale Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Painting and Paying Tribute to Indigenous Cultural Legacies

He was reminiscing from a very different vantage this past winter, just six weeks out from unveiling his United States Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the first time an Indigenous artist has represented America with a solo show at the illustrious affair. He was not holed up in a New York City studio but splayed out in an enormous converted schoolhouse in Hudson, an Upstate outpost that has been his home since 2012. His art for the Venice show had already shipped, but his team of some 20 studio assistants was occupied with works in various stages of creation: radiant paintings, dynamic sculptures, glamorous costumes, and dazzling ornamentation based in beads.

However far removed from his early years, it had not been all that long since a younger Gibson wandered around the Biennale wondering what might lie ahead of him. “As a struggling young artist in New York City, you don’t know how to know if anyone even cares. I had been to the Biennale when I was in grad school, but this was my first time there with any access to anything, and it was really important to feel included,” he recalled of that 2007 trip.

Kathleen Ash-Milby, a Navajo curator who was also then on the rise, had invited Gibson to Venice to see an event she organized via the NMAI for Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho), an artist 17 years Gibson’s senior. “I remember Edgar naming the Indigenous people who had died while traveling in Europe on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show,” Gibson said of the cowboys-and-Indians spectacle that toured overseas around the turn of the 20th century. “That was very significant for me.”

He also remembered meeting other Indigenous artists who would become allies and, especially, forging an important bond with Ash-Milby, who would play an important role in his being awarded the US Pavilion close to two decades later. Ash-Milby said she recalled some wild speculative dreaming about such a fate, “which at the time seemed like an insane idea.”

Gibson, for his part, remembered appreciating the provocation inherent in Edgar Heap of Birds’s presentation, and feeling curious about what might happen if even more change ever came: “I think we both kind of felt like, Is this the beginning of something—something that hasn’t happened?”

GIBSON WAS BORN IN 1972 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but grew up as a citizen of the world. With extended family in Mississippi and Oklahoma, he moved around while his father worked different jobs as a civil engineer for the US Department of Defense. He lived in Germany before elementary school and then spent time in New Jersey before relocating in his early teens to South Korea in 1985.

“Korea was impactful for me, partially because I was paying attention more independently to popular culture as it was being funneled abroad,” Gibson said. “This is when MTV was big, and there was street culture and an art scene in New York City that was being shown through music and fashion. There was one hour of MTV at midnight, and we would all talk about it, because we were jonesing.”

Formative discoveries at the time included Culture Club and Wham!, two pop acts that signaled an interest in music and identification with queer culture that figure in his art decades later. Other discoveries helped develop a capacity for cultural versatility, then and now. “When I was a kid, I romantically identified as a nomad,” Gibson said. “Living abroad and being American was an empowered and privileged place to be. But when I would come back to the US, I would be reminded that I was a person of color, and that we didn’t have as much money as it felt like we had when we were abroad. What I would bring back with me was a sense that I had traveled and seen other things. It made me feel like I knew there was a huge world. Being aware of other cultures certainly helped inform my general aesthetic and understanding of difference.”

While living overseas, Gibson returned to the US regularly, around once or twice a year, to visit relatives—and commune with histories and heritages that figured in his Indigenous identity. “My experience is a 20th-century Native American experience, and the idea that there’s any line between what is or isn’t a ‘Native American experience’ is blurry,” he said. “It’s problematic when we think about Native American heritages, especially in the 20th century, because they’re all so unique.”

Poverty and racism were issues for both the Choctaw and Cherokee sides of his family, but their circumstances differed significantly—and developed differently over time. In Mississippi, the longtime chief of the Choctaw tribe during Gibson’s childhood devised an economic plan that brought factory work and financial stability to the area. “By the ’90s, the tribe was one of the largest employers in the state, and it had a surplus of employment beyond our tribal population,” Gibson said. “So that’s the story of the Choctaw people, in addition to what we could talk about in terms of tribal dances, ribbon shirts, basket weaving, and the symbolism that exists there.”

In Oklahoma, where the Cherokee part of his family resided, Christianity played a role in Native American culture that clashed in certain ways with traditions that had been handed down over centuries. “Within both sides of my family—in Oklahoma and Mississippi—there were people who identified as Christian and others who continued traditional spiritual practices. I had uncles who continued doing traditional dancing and a grandmother and grandfather who established Southern Baptist churches.”

During visits to America, Gibson’s relationship with the various facets of his family complicated any easy answer to the question of how closely he identified as Indigenous. “It’s always been difficult for me to distinguish how much I am a part of a community,” he said. “I was always embraced, and because I would leave and go to Korea didn’t make me any less Choctaw. Wherever that line is, comes more from an external perspective. We never stopped being Choctaw or Cherokee. If anything, I think the subject is more how we quantify how those communities were shifting, decade by decade, throughout the entire 20th century. And that’s just for those two tribes—there are other tribes who have different narratives.”

In any case, Gibson said his relationship with Indigeneity owes to what he grew up with and what he has honed on his own over time. “I have never lived among a Native community where everyone around me was Native all the time, seven days a week,” he said. “But I also refuse to let anyone make me feel that my leaving the reservation makes me less Choctaw. It’s just not that simple.”

GIBSON WAS TRAINED AS A PAINTER, but his canvases—vibrant and geometric, with mesmerizingly colored patterns and bits of text he borrows from sources including pop songs, poems, and historical records—have increasingly become just one component of his shows. His work for the US Pavilion in Venice includes 11 paintings, nine sculptures, eight flags, two murals, and one video installation. A key feature of much of his art, including the paintings, is beadwork that glistens and gleams by way of handicraft as fine as that in haute couture.

Gibson’s facility with materials traces back to his university years in Chicago, where he moved in 1992 to study at the Art Institute. The next year, he took a side job at the Field Museum of Natural History as a research assistant working with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which since 1990 has provided for the protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. His work related to the legislation, which has grown in significance in recent years, involved processing items in the museum’s collection and showing them to tribal delegations that came through.

“Sometimes we had protocols to follow, but we didn’t always even know exactly what an object was, which brought up a lot of questions,” Gibson said. “Even though something may have had a record that said it was voluntarily sold, we would look back and see that it was sold under duress, or that the person who sold it was not necessarily in a position to do so. There were many things that were ‘collected’—or stolen—and there were things that should not be shared about what an object was or what it was used for.”

One such object was a prayer bundle, a parcel filled with spiritually significant contents that had been secreted away and wrapped in cloth or other material. “The only person who knows how to use what’s inside a prayer bundle is someone who’s been raised within ceremony to understand what it is and what to do with it,” Gibson said. “Many prayer bundles had been disassembled, and this was horrific to people who think they are never meant to be seen.” Another example was a stick that had seemed to some museum staffers to be part of a game but turned out to be imbued with other qualities. “Somebody came in and said, ‘No, you must cover that up immediately!’ It literally went from being one thing to another.”

Gibson’s work at the museum taught him about what he did and did not know, and he was energized by both. “NAGPRA is an amazing and hard-won law,” he said, “but what it really taught me was the problems of intercultural translation, language, perception, even entire worldviews. We could look at any object and there are going to be differences in how we view it. That became really interesting to me.”

It also opened his eyes to materials other than paint, and roles for art that ventured beyond simple states of objecthood. He learned to sew in Chicago from a fellow Native American friend who vowed to make her own clothes, and he made a doll that wound up scrambling his value system. “It was a ragdoll figure of a blonde woman wearing a buckskin dress. The fabric I used for her body was a Southwest print,” he said, adding that inspiration had been provided by white-presenting women he’d seen at powwows wearing clothes that had clearly been bought for the occasion.

A professor at the Art Institute liked the doll and “wanted to introduce me to people who could write about it or show it, but I just shut down so quickly,” Gibson said. “For me, at the time, it felt like much less of a responsibility to make an abstract painting about paint and put it out into the world. To make something that was actually a statement with a kind of critical perspective—I wasn’t ready for that.”

He was acquainting himself with different ways to work within and around tradition, however, and ways to question what exactly constitutes tradition in Indigenous cultures that are ever-changing. “I’ve always worked intuitively with different materials, based on my experience of working with historic collections and realizing all the innovations that stepped away from what I had been taught about ‘traditional’ materials,” he said. “Even things we think of as traditional, like beads, replaced other traditions. We are innovators—this is what we do. We look around and try to think about how we can make materials into something that serves our culture or serves our community. I started to see that way of thinking as a tradition in and of itself.”

“JEFFREY SHOWS THAT ONE of the most important things about contemporary Indigenous culture is that it has a specific cultural and material inheritance, but its cultural inheritance is expressed through its materials,” said Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), a curator who first showed Gibson’s work in a show about Indigenous futurism in 2011 and, two years later, in “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada that has been credited with reshaping studies of contemporary Indigenous art. For the latter show, Gibson made two paintings on elk hide that had been treated via a process that has been largely lost to history: brain tanning.

“A lot of commercial hide production is just that—very commercialized,” Gibson said. “The animals aren’t treated with a great life. They’re not killed in a humane way. In the belief system, there are histories that are inherent to hides, and I knew I wanted a hide with a different narrative.”

After some searching, he found a hunter in Montana who still practices the craft, which involves massaging the fatty matter of an animal’s brain into a hide to soften and preserve it. The hunter had killed an elk of the kind that Gibson wanted, but winter set in before he was able to tan it, so he buried the skin in the ground to freeze for the season with a plan to exhume it in the spring. As time ticked on, though, Gibson started to get anxious. “I had a deadline coming up and I was like, ‘I really need this hide!’ I felt like such a consumer,” he remembered. “Consumer thinking trains us that we can have things when we want them. But it was all part of the narrative, and I had to give in to it.”

When he finally received the brain-tanned hides, he painted them with boldly colored diagonals that suggest a sort of abstract topography and titled them This Place I Know and Someone Great Is Gone (both 2013). “That taught me a lot about the material roots of Jeffrey’s practice and the honesty to materials that he brings forward,” Hopkins said. “Everything has a story to tell.” For his part, Gibson remembered discovering a sort of poetry in the process. “The idea behind brain tanning,” he said, “is to take the memory of the animal and put it back into the skin.”

For a 2019 residency at the New Museum in New York, Gibson learned a battery of new skills, and made his education part of the premise of an exhibition that evolved as his knowledge grew. “He talked about this thing that happens when he’s asked to do a project that is supposed to represent Indigeneity, even though it’s super-differentiated, as a generalist idea,” said Johanna Burton, who curated “The Anthropophagic Effect” as part of the New Museum’s department of education and public engagement (she is now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). “He was excited about the fact that he had to learn some of the skills he wanted to use the same way that anybody else would.”

With the idea of an Indigenous atelier in mind, Gibson brought artist Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe) from Michigan to New York to teach him and his studio staff crafts that had been practiced by Indigenous people long before the arrival of European settlers. One such craft, birchbark biting (what the Northwestern Ontario Ojibwe call mazinashkwemaganjigan), involves making patterns in tree coverings by biting into them and exposing layers and fissures within. “It’s all in the way you fold the bark and then bite it, and birchbark pieces would become patterns for embroidery and, eventually, beadwork,” Gibson said. “That came at a time when I was thinking about how Native people think about abstraction differently. It’s in many ways abstract, but it’s also so specific to the person who did the biting.”

Other newly acquired skills included porcupine quillwork and river cane basket weaving, which were useful in creating garments that voguing dancers wore in performances that activated the artworks. Gibson also made helmets with the basket weaving process, transforming it to his own ends. “It’s not Choctaw tradition to make helmets, but it is Choctaw tradition to make river cane baskets,” he said. “My goal was never to recreate what was made previously. I didn’t want to learn how to make baskets—I wanted to learn the technology of making a basket, so that I could then make sculpture.”

GIBSON’S RESOURCEFUL, RESILIENT WORK for the US Pavilion in Venice draws on his many modes of art-making that commune with traditions while also revising and redefining them in his own terms. Color is in high supply, as are allusions to struggle and perseverance. “He has been addressing the same kind of problems in different ways while looking at, respecting, and honoring the Native experience,” said Ash-Milby, the curator who has worked with Gibson from the start of his career. “Part of that is acknowledging that there have been challenges and pain. That’s part of what we carry and who we are today.”

When the idea arose to submit a proposal for the Venice Biennale, Gibson turned to a trio of supporters for help: Ash-Milby, currently the curator of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Louis Grachos, who presented a wide-ranging survey titled “The Body Electric” at SITE Sante Fe in 2022; and Abigail Winograd, an independent curator who worked with Gibson on a 2021 exhibition related to the MacArthur Fellowship Program (Gibson won a prestigious “genius grant” in 2019).

For the show with Winograd, titled “Sweet Bitter Love,” Gibson made paintings in response to stereotypical late 19th- and early 20th-century portraits of Indigenous people in the collection of Chicago’s Newberry Library, and exhibited accession cards from the Field Museum, where he had worked while a student. In his paintings, Gibson aimed to open up the historical portraits by riffing and remixing them in a manner that made them personal to him and his place in time. Part of that included attaching vintage objects—beaded barrettes, found pins, decorated belts—that he collects in part as a tribute to unnamed artists who contribute to culture in a multitude of ways.

“We know the names of the sitters in paintings, but with vintage objects, oftentimes we don’t know the names of the people who made them,” Gibson said. “Those objects are also not valued, and we don’t know how they were acquired. The collective Native American experience in the US is shaped by the unnamed and the unknown, by all of these gaps and exclusions and erasures. That’s what I wanted those pieces to speak to.”

Such vintage finds figure in many of his Venice works. A sculptural bust titled Be Some Body (2024) is affixed with a button that bears the message IF WE SETTLE FOR WHAT THEY’RE GIVING US, WE DESERVE WHAT WE GET. A painting in which diamond-shaped patterns seem to recede and pulse out into open space, WE WILL BE KNOWN FOREVER BY THE TRACKS WE LEAVE (2024) flaunts a belt buckle and bolo tie, as well as a bag embellished with lane-stitch beadwork.

Some of the work winds back to familiar forms. The hanging sculpture WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (2024)—elaborately beaded and adorned with fringe that spills onto the floor in the black, white, yellow, and red colors of the medicine wheel—revisits a series of punching bag pieces that Gibson started working on in 2010, when he found a form that evoked the anger he felt around matters of race, class, and bodily disconnection. An interactive sculpture that shares its title with that of Gibson’s pavilion as a whole—the space in which to place me (2024)—echoes a 2022 project for which he invited Indigenous people to populate empty monument pedestals in front of the Portland Art Museum.

Activation is a key component of Gibson’s practice, in which performance and pedagogy play pivotal roles. In June the Pavilion will host the Venice Indigenous Arts School, a series of public programs focused on key terminology and concepts in Indigenous arts, arranged by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. “An example would be various terms for weather that take into consideration how weather affects the whole process of making art and putting it out there,” said Mario A. Caro, director of the Institute’s studio arts MFA program, who organized the event. “Weather informs the ways in which traditional materials would be gathered and processed. And by ‘weather,’ we don’t just mean ecology or environmental issues—weather really talks about a relation between the people and the land.” Another part of the program, in October, will explore connections between Indigenous cultures in North America and around the world, in partnership with Bard College, where Gibson teaches.

With a global audience set to engage his work at the Venice Biennale, Gibson said he had charged himself with continuing to position his own past, present, and future in relation to a prism of Indigenous histories and ideas. The task has been daunting, he said. But it is also catalyzing in ways he hopes will carry over. “I don’t identify as a frontline activist,” Gibson said. “But we are all politicized for how we are seen. We are also advocating for our political selves, and those political selves are rooted in our ancestry and our heritages.”

When looking over images of his Venice works in his schoolhouse studio a few months back, Gibson paused at a large bird sculpture with rainbow-colored plumage rendered in a riotous mix of materials including glass beads, rose quartz, and metallic sequins. Its title is if there is no struggle there is no progress (2024), a quotation from a speech by Frederick Douglass, and it is one of two such birds in the Pavilion.

“They’re based in the Tuscarora tradition of beaded whimsies,” Gibson said. “The bird was one of the primary forms they used to try to appeal to Victorian tastes, but they were seen as neither Native enough nor not-Native enough. I encountered them at the Field Museum and felt very much akin to them because they’re somewhere in between all these different kinds of cultural traditions. That’s how the birds work.”  

This article appears under the title “Hide and Seek” in the Summer 2024 “Icons” issue, pp. 56–63.