Photography by Menelik PuryearI n 2022, US artist Jeffrey Gibson sent out an open call to performers from the Rocky Mountain Color Guard Association, a local chapter of the national marching arts movement. Gibson, who is of Cherokee and Choctaw descent, was seeking participants for a flag-spinning performance as part of his exhibition, The Spirits are Laughing, at the Aspen Art Museum in his birthplace of Colorado. In the opening sequence of the live work, the 15-strong team he assembled and choreographed stood in a circle, each holding a different flag designed by Gibson firmly at their side. The group broke formation in a synchronised march, their flags fluttering, before reconvening and smoothly dipping them inside and out of their final circle.

Now Gibson has reworked the design of one of these flags for a limited-edition artwork – a cashmere blanket – that is being sold by Sotheby’s in partnership with this year’s commissioners, the Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe, to raise funds for Gibson’s landmark presentation for the US Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. While representing the US on the art world’s biggest stage is sure to be uniquely revealing of the vision Gibson has developed over three decades as an artist, the blanket is a window into his intuitive practice, incorporating his signature use of bold colour in its striking, triangle-dominated design.

“Gibson’s feel for colour is like when you hit a tuning fork – everything harmonises”

–Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator of Native American Art at Portland Art Museum

“I grew up with a lot of people criticising my use of colour,” Gibson, 51, explains on the line from his studio, a converted schoolhouse in Hudson, New York. “But ultimately, I just kept having this impulse to use it – in a way that hasn’t left me.” He also relies on gut instinct when considering pattern: “I started paying attention to what I was returning to again and again, which is a grid and geometrical shapes – working with horizontals and verticals. At this point the basic grid of triangles can do a lot, and seems to be my return to home base.”

Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator of Native American Art at Portland Art Museum, likens Gibson’s feel for colour to “when you hit a tuning fork – everything harmonises” – an effect evidenced in his blanket design. “There is a functional quality to it,” says Sharon Coplan Hurowitz, Sotheby’s liaison for the project. “But it is also a work of art.” The artist Senam Okudzeto, who has known Gibson since the 1990s, says: “What is impressive is that he has been able to work across a number of scales. Some of his most enticing work is intimate, especially the text-based works.” 

The phrase “I feel real when you hold me” is central to the composition of Gibson’s blanket. “It reflects my thinking about wrapping things, but also my relationship to people and objects,” he explains. “In my experience, working in museums with North American collections, there are objects that have not been ‘held’, because they have been removed from their communities.”

Song lyrics are common references in his work, by artists ranging from Gladys Knight and the Pips to Public Enemy. His choices tend to draw on personal favourites or what he’s listening to at the time, in this case Nina Simone in combination with Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). “I wouldn’t say it’s a mantra, but it is definitely a personal anthem,” he says. Ironically, working with text has taught Gibson about the limits of what he can control as an artist. “My initial fear was that I would be locking a viewer into one meaning, but you soon realise legibility is very slippery.”

Throughout his career he has grappled with how legible to make his influences, which relate as much to aesthetics and an international upbringing in Germany, South Korea and England as to his queer and Native American identity. But across his genre-defying oeuvre – spanning sculpture, printmaking, performance and painting – Gibson has openly integrated all manner of objects and materials commonly associated with Indigenous histories: from baskets and textiles to intricate beadwork, the latter memorably deployed on his series of punching bags.

For Immediate PurchaseJeffrey Gibson, ‘I Feel Real When You Hold Me,’ 2024. Limited Edition Cashmere Blanket: $7,500

“If I want to be direct, if I want to be indirect, I have opened up those spaces for myself in my practice”

–Jeffrey Gibson