by Anne Gabriel
I want to talk about Jeffrey Gibson, but I feel like I will be drawn and quartered if I do. The US indigenous art darling who represented the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) has a current show up at the Broad.
Gibson considers himself an assemblage artist and that makes sense. The multi-room exhibition space was a giant assemblage of elements of his Native-American heritage mashed together with bright rainbow hues pulled from the iconography of LGBTQ+ activism. He filled the rooms with sculpture made out of tassels, beading and ceramics, wall-pieces and murals covered with crayola-colored words in abstracted shapes, a hallway of brightly colored flags (again with words comprised of abstracted child-like shapes), and a projection room playing kaleidoscopic videos to dance music.
I hated it.
Not because Gibson isn’t a great artist. He’s ok.
The problem was that it was just so expected. Indigenous heritage?—add beads. Part of the LGBTQ+ community?—make it rainbow! I can imagine that in Venice, Italy this may have been a striking statement that the US is not just its president, but in Los Angeles in 2025—I see this every weekend.
There were several standout pieces—most notably his sculptures, where the painstaking bead and tassel work looms with a commanding presence.
The overall sense was a frenzied montage of material and pattern and not much else. It is clear that Gibson intended the exhibition to be both thought provoking and joyful—but rainbow colors don’t equate to either in a world where Pride events are an expected event on the corporate calendar. This is a case of someone given too large of a budget and platform and relying on visual statement-making to make an exhibition—making it easily forgettable, at least in an urban center.
I wanted to see something of Gibson in the work—instead of simply seeing what he wanted from the world. On the way out through the first room, I thought I saw it. Tucked in a corner, and almost hidden—was one small, approximately 12 inch x 24 inch piece. My first thought was “there he is” and something in me made me think that that little jewel of patterned assemblage was the inspiration for all the rest. Somehow a personality—a man—peeked through, just before dozens of images just like it—but not quite—rushed in to reproduce and reduce that personality back into a brand.
Images: Staff