Time Carriers conjures a vision of many hands providing a framework of support, a fluid utopia where trust and movement go hand in hand. It evokes a time frame that both unites and collapses present, past, and future into an undulating and responsive single unit, something that could best be described as community or family. This idea is especially appropriate when considering Jeffrey Gibson’s work, as he has always pushed to create kinship among unlikely partners. Collaboration is at the heart of his practice; working and learning with artists and craftspeople as a way to resist acculturation, support a strong legacy of making, and to build and honor community.

Gibson’s focus on creating garments in the last few years is a logical progression from previous work, drawing on the bodily-ness of his ongoing punching bags series and the cloak-like qualities of his wall hangings. Each garment starts from a single pattern, cut to be oversized on the artist’s body. In researching traditional Indigenous makers who were creating things for themselves and their communities for use, not as art, Gibson observed the incredible power and respect these garments commanded. He decided he wanted to “dress” his work with his own cultural legacy, and further complicate his definition of the art object by insisting his work be wearable. After seeing too many lifeless garments in museum display cases, decontextualized from their cultures and the individuals who wore them, it became crucial to Gibson to also activate his garment works through performance.

Originally commissioned as a performance by the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, in 2019, and then presented in New York at the New Museum, To Name An Other was first seen as both a performance and an installation in his presentation at the Esker Foundation in Canada. The garments and accompanying drums are printed with a “name” that describes an action or event that Gibson has found inspiring and courageous in defiance of circumstances he views as wrong. Avoiding terms such as “cultural resistance,” “colonialism,” or “patriarchy” for fear they will become flattened, Gibson prefers to describe the specifics of a circumstance, defining them as either right or wrong. Things are wrong when someone is silenced, erased, denied their civil rights, treated inhumanely, or because privilege and power are given rules that are different or inequitable. He states, “Although I feel confident that I know what is right and wrong, I also know that life is a constant negotiation and that negotiating is more and more difficult the more engaged you become.” Although the performance of To Name An Other occurs for just under an hour, its residual echo continues to make space for a diversity of voices to have powerful and continued agency in the public sphere; the garments activated in the performance remain, and have been forever altered by the abilities, responses, and histories of living bodies and loud voices.