This year’s 60th annual Venice Art Biennale marked the first-ever solo exhibition of an Indigenous artist from Turtle Island. Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, transformed the American pavilion with his unabashed array of colours. Curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby and Abigail Wingrad, Gibson’s site-responsive major solo exhibition the space in which to place me, acknowledged the impacts of historical trauma through radical acts of joy, queerness and poetry.
Gibson’s the space in which to place me is a flourish of colour, queer love, and borrows a line from Ogala Lakota poet and activist Layli Long Solider’s poem “He Sápa, part three.” The poem reads: “This is how you see the space in which to place me./ The space in me you see is the place/ To see this space see how you place me in you/ This is how to place you in the space in which to see.” As a Mi’kmaq-Settler poet, I am awestruck how the artist fuses poetry into his kaleidoscopic larger-than-life exhibition, and in away, how Solider’s poetry provokes it all.
The American pavilion is covered in hand-painted, colourful murals and flags and centres Gibson’s bright-red, outdoor, classical pedestal sculptures. As I enter the American pavilion I meet two towering ancestral spirits, The Enforcer (2024) and WE WANT TO BE FREE (2024). I see Solider’s poem is on the didactic panel on the wall, but I can’t stop looking up to the spirits. With their glazed ceramic heads akin to Mississippian effigy pots temporary, they loom in front of a mural that says, “we are made by history,” which is an excerpt from a 1954 speech by Native makers from the Columbia River Plateau community.
The rainbow-coloured cloaks of the ancestral spirits are made from glass and plastic beads, nylon fringe, tin jingles, and nylon thread. WE WANT TO BE FREE references the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the law that gave all US citizens equal protection, and 1924’s Indian Citizenship Act, which granted Indigenous people in America basic human rights. The Enforcer alludes to the Reconstruction Acts (1865–1870) and the Reconstruction Amendments that, combined, sought to protect the rights of Black citizens post slavery, and the 1870s Enforcement Act, which made it illegal to interfere with a person’s right to vote. This is a powerful and humbling welcome.
Gibson’s work is much a riot as it is a rainbow.
He draws inspiration from everything from powwows to nightclubs. Throughout the exhibition his works centre cross-tribal beaded belt buckles and beadwork medallions within his unique, original designs that fuse text, objects, and paintings. The visual conversation between traditional makers and contemporary Indigenous art is an intergenerational exchange.
A beaded punching bag with the beadwork text: “WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT” (2024) hangs from the ceiling of a red-painted alcove. Nylon threads hang from the beadwork woven punching bag and fall to the ground to create a circular train of black, white, yellow, and red—the colours of the medicine wheel. As I sit with work, I can hear drums and music from The Halluci Nation throughout exhibition pavilion. My heart beats a little faster as the space continues to evolve into a place of radical transformation, healing and art.
Gibson’s the space in which to place me ends with the powerful video installation, She Never Dances Alone (2020) draws viewers in. It features Sarah Oregon Highwalking dancing in a series of her own jingle dresses to electronic dance group The Halluci Nation’s song “Sisters,” from their 2013 album Nation II Nation. Gibson’s video celebrates the Indigenous matriarchy and reminds viewers we are never dancing alone. In it, Highwalking multiplies to become many women, representing all Indigenous mothers, sisters, daughters, and aunties. Gibson’s ground-breaking exhibition the space in which to place me celebrates Indigenous resilience, love and radical acts of healing. The Venice Art Biennale in Venice, Italy runs from April 20 to September 30, 2024.
