Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day | Exhibition Trailer

Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day
September 8 - December 9, 2018
Curated by Tracy L. Adler
Video created by Brett Novak

Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day highlights new developments in the artist’s practice featuring over fifty works of sculpture, painting, installation and video made between 2014 and 2018. As part of the exhibition, the Wellin will debut a series of new sculptural works and an original film that melds documentary and fantastical elements as it follows Macy, a transgender Choctaw woman living on a reservation in rural Mississippi. This Is the Day offers fresh insights into Gibson’s artistic approach, which brings together the artist’s Native American heritage with popular and queer culture to explore evolving cultural trends, current events, and traditions. Gibson draws from a range of influences and visual languages to comment on race, sexuality, religion, and gender. Often combining beadwork, fringe and jingles synonymous with Native American pow wow rituals with lyrics from songs from the 1980s such as “Dearly beloved” and “Hold me now” in his sculptural tableaus, Gibson seamlessly blends diverse materials and references.

Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day will be accompanied by a publication with a foreword and interview with the artist by Tracy L. Adler, and essays by Jane Panetta and Lowery Sims. This book will be copublished by the Wellin Museum of Art and DelMonico Books/Prestel.

Jeffrey Gibson’s work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the National Academy of Art in New York City (2013), the Savannah College of Art and Design (2016), the Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City (2017), and a retrospective organized by the Denver Museum of Art (2018). Recent group shows include Prospect.3: Notes for Now in New Orleans (2015), Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2016), and the Desert X in Palm Springs (2017). Gibson is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the Smithsonian Institute Contemporary Arts Grant, and the Creative Capital Foundation Grant, among others. He is an artist-in-residence at Bard College and lives and works in Hudson, New York.

Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day will travel to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin where it will be on view from July 14–September 29, 2019.