A Dream Acquisition: Jeffrey Gibson’s “I’M TAKING TIME AWAY TO DREAM”

Stars align for purchase of work by Jeffrey Gibson

For over two decades, Jeffrey Gibson has created works that bridge his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and mainstream popular culture. His early works stretched elk skin over a traditional drum or an unexpected ironing board painted with high-keyed colors in geometric patterns that were as much Indigenous design as Op Art and rave club decoration. In the 2010s, Gibson’s punching bags decorated in beads, jingles, and ribbons, emblazoned with empowering slogans — KNOW YOUR MAGIC, TRAPPED IN THE DREAM OF THE OTHER, NOTHING IS ETERNAL — caught the attention of the art world. While the sculpture echoed fashion, the embellished paintings Gibson made simultaneously continued the pushpull with Indigenous and Western art’s visual languages. As if they were in a call and response, the two-dimensional works mashed up gay clubbing, hip-hop, and art history. Native American objects immediately cue a narrative deviating from a straightforwardly Western art history.

On a CBS Sunday Morning episode in May 2024, Gibson observed that when people see beads, “they know immediately that this is coming from a different history than a Rembrandt painting.” And while the zig-zag design may evoke Indigenous weaving patterns, the color palette is a reference to both Indigenous and queer culture aesthetics. They could be found as easily in a disco as in fancy dance regalia. Gibson clarifies his use of color, with the “we” referring to queer culture as well as Indigenous.

In a New York Times article about his work, Gibson recalls while working to earn his bachelor’s degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, professors criticized his intense colors as “gaudy, trashy, kitschy and campy.” Gibson combatted this dismissal by making those very design elements the representation of strength and confidence. The work flows easily between Indigenous aesthetics, Chelsea-gallery conceptualism, and commercial design. His powerful pattern and decoration works have steadily moved to larger platforms. In 2018, his large tunics loomed over the champagne-sipping crowd at the New York Armory; major museum retrospectives at Seattle Art Museum (2019) and Portland Art Museum (2023) follows.

This year, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in an installation poignantly titled the space in which to place me. For the Venice exhibition, Gibson covered the building’s walls, inside and out, with his vibrant vectors of high-keyed hues. The exterior courtyard hosted an opening Jingle Dance performance by the Oklahoma Fancy Dancers and Colorado Inter-tribal Dancers in traditional dress (the footage is incredible and good clips can be found on YouTube, Venissage.TV, and the Portland Art Museum’s website). Inside, paintings with the same vibrating palette as the walls double the effect. Phrases and beaded objects add another layer to the paintings, each element a talisman — the brilliant triangles pushing our bodies and eyes, the collected objects as a keepsake from someone not present, and the words a guiding mantra from Gibson, which like the objects, are acquired second-hand from another source. (Gibson’s titles often quote poems or song lyrics; the pavilion title references the poem “He Sápa” by Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier.) These are gifts collected by the artist and passed onto us in the same way tradition and heritage makes its way through bloodlines and brethren. In Gibson’s words, “We are all living ends of very long threads.”

The acquisition story

Thanks to the generosity of the Mint Museum Auxiliary, The Mint Museum was able to purchase Jeffrey Gibson’s I’m Taking Time Away to Dream (2023). Annemarie Coyle, the Mint Museum Auxiliary’s 2023-2025 art chair, wanted this year’s Auxiliary donation to be as significant as the magnificent Maria Grazia Chiuri Dior dress purchased last year for the Craft, Design, and Fashion Collection. A work by Jeffrey Gibson has long been on the Mint’s Craft, Design, and Fashion wish list and the Contemporary Art Collection development plan. His intersection of craft traditions and techniques and traditional art methods allow him to cross multiple collection areas for the Mint. That broad relevance to the Mint’s collecting practices and Gibson’s representation at the Biennale made his work ideal.

Stephen Friedman Gallery’s preview of Gibson’s first London solo show hit curators’ inboxes January 11, 2024. Coyle and the Mint’s CEO and President Todd Herman, PhD, and I fell in love with two of the works, but it was essential to see the paintings. The Mint Museum Auxiliary board fortunately had a trip planned to London the week the Friedman show opened. The gallery agreed to hold the two pieces until the group, which included Herman; Senior Curator of Craft, Design, and Fashion Annie Carlano; and president of the Mint Museum Auxiliary Anna Glass, arrived. I’m Taking Time Away to Dream was selected.

The work will be installed in the Contemporary Art galleries at Mint Museum Uptown in fall 2024. The full rainbow spectrum consumes the surface, from canvas to the artist-painted frame. Vintage beaded patches — flowers reminiscent of a 1960s peacenik era and an American buffalo standing stoically beneath a rainbow — quote Indigenous decoration and the appropriation of those aesthetics into mainstream fashion. But the colors and beads also evoke queer culture, as Gibson has created a memorial for those lost at a young age to the AIDS epidemic. “I’m taking time away to dream” is the opening line of “Time Away,” a song by the multifaceted experimental musician Arthur Russell, who was only 40 years old when he died of AIDS-related causes. Gibson’s work evolves directly from his life: a gay, Indigenous man, born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a military kid, who grew up on Army bases in Korea and Germany, as well as numerous states, including North Carolina. Because of this, his work straddles many forms of American culture — indigenous and colonial, domestic and international.

In a June 2024 Bomb magazine interview with Anthony Hudson, Gibson states: “I’ve also tried to make work over the last 20 years that speaks to the many facets of my experience, which isn’t only rooted in Native cultures but also in the many places I’ve lived and the family I have. Dare I say, many intersections make up Jeffrey Gibson, and I feel responsible to them all.” As well as many more — Gibson layers multiple lost stories and marginalized voices into an image so vibrant and resonate, it cannot be overlooked easily or forgotten quickly. Gibson says of his viewers: “I want them to see survival, I want them to see innovation, I want them to see empowered people because so often, at least in my lifetime, we’ve been represented through our trauma. I want to present us as being very present and aware and powerful.”

–Jen Sudul Edwards, PhD, chief curator and curator of Contemporary Art at The Mint Museum.