'MONUMENTS NOW' – Part I: Jeffrey Gibson - Socrates Sculpture Park

July 10, 2020 – March 21, 2021

‘Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House’

Plywood, posters, steel, LEDs, and performances
44 × 44 × 21 ft

Photo Credits – #1, 3, 5, 7, & 8 Installation images by KMDeco Creative Solutions: Mark DiConzo; #2 Image by Scott Lynch of Emily Johnson performance; #4 Installation image by Sara Morgan; #6 Image by Cut/Cut/Cut: Chelsea Knight & Iztiar Barrio of Laura Ortman performance

About

Jeffrey Gibson’s project for the ‘MONUMENTS NOW‘ exhibition, ‘Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House,’ serves as an homage to ingenuity of Indigenous North American peoples and cultures, to pre-Columbian Mississippian architecture, and to queer camp aesthetics. Gibson designed the multi-tiered structure to reference the earthen architecture of the ancient metropolis of Cahokia, which was the largest city of the North American Indigenous Mississippian people at its height in the thirteenth century. The earth mound of the pre-Columbian ziggurat is represented in Gibson’s multi-tiered monument with a plywood structure adorned with a vibrant surface of wheat-pasted posters. The posters integrate geometric designs inspired by the Serpent Mound located in Ohio, another monument of the Mississippi Valley, alongside texts that operate as activist slogans. Gibson also curated Indigenous led performances to activate the structure over the course of the installation.

Programming

Gibson invited three Indigenous creatives – Laura Ortman, Emily Johnson, and Raven Chacon – to activate ‘Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House,’ with a series of performances released as part of a virtual screening series over the course of the ‘MONUMENTS NOW‘ exhibition.

In Conversation: Artist Jeffrey Gibson & Socrates Curator Jess Wilcox–>

Indigenous Kinship Collective Land Acknowledgment–>

Laura Ortman Performance Documentary Premiere–>

Emily Johnson Performance Documentary Premiere–>

In Conversation: Jeffrey Gibson, Laura Ortman, Emily Johnson, & Raven Chacon–>

Press

The New Yorker

Jeffrey Gibson and his project at the Park were photographed by Steven M. Contreras for the July 27th issue of The New Yorker magazine. See Image–>

Artful Magazine

Karen Rosenberg interviewed Jeffrey Gibson for Artful Magazine. Published July 6, 2020.

[Excerpt]

Karen Rosenberg: The question of what to do about some of our monuments is very much in the news right now. But this is also an issue that’s been with us for a while, and shows such as the one at Socrates take a lot of planning. How and when did you come up with your monument, and how it has evolved?

Jeffrey Gibson: It was about a year ago when the show’s curator, Jess Wilcox, invited me to do the project. By the time there was a national movement to take down monuments, we were already well into confirmed plans for my piece. It had been sitting in my mind for some time to work with the architecture of a Mississippean culture mound. The idea of somehow activating the structure with performances was also there in the beginning.

KR: What were some of your formal and historical sources of inspiration? You’ve made references to the earth mounds of the ancient city of Cahokia, in what is now Illinois, and the pre-Columbian ziggurat.

JG: In my early twenties I worked in the anthropology department at the Field Museum, while I was going to the Art Institute of Chicago. I learned a lot there about tribes and cultures beyond my own. But when I came across the earthworks of Mississippean culture, I was just shocked that I had been unaware of them. My tribe, the Mississippi Choctaw, is one of the tribes that emerged out of the Mississippean culture. Popular history doesn’t even acknowledge the Mississippean culture—it puts forward the idea that there was not a fully realized civilization pre-contact, when in fact the Mississippean cultural finds are evidence that there was one. There’s evidence of government, of civic culture. So when I was asked to do this project, the first thing that came to mind was that mound structure.

Read full article in Artful Magazine–>

Jeffrey Gibson Bio

Jeffrey Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hudson, New York. His artworks make reference to various aesthetic and material histories rooted in Indigenous cultures of the Americas, and in modern and contemporary subcultures. Gibson is a recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant.

Gibson’s previous exhibitions include, Jeffrey Gibson, ‘LIKE A HAMMER,’ organized by the Denver Art Museum, and ‘This Is The Day,’ organized by The Wellin Museum. Other notable solo exhibitions include: ‘The Anthropophagic Effect’ (2019) The New Museum, New York; ‘Look How Far We’ve Come!’ (2017), Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; ‘Jeffrey Gibson: Speak to Me,’ (2017), Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, Oklahoma City; and ‘A Kind of Confession’ (2016), Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, Savannah.