This work belongs to a series of beaded bird sculptures Jeffrey Gibson debuted in 2021 in his solo exhibition Beyond the Horizon at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. That exhibition marked a profound turning point in Gibson’s practice, where Gibson confronted notions of representation through the use of appropriated images and materials examining the difference between how Indigenous people represent themselves artistically, and how they are represented by others.

Interwoven into many of the works in the exhibition were delicate, beaded objects dating from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Taken from Gibson’s private collection, these items were often made for personal reasons by their intended users, and other times made as “whimseys,” so-called because of their value to tourists as objects of wonder and amusement. Incorporating traditional and global materials, these beaded objects elucidate a crucial turning point more than a century and a half ago, when sudden access to global trade allowed Native American artists to expand their visual and material lexicon. Such moments amplify awareness of Modernism not as a one-time Western phenomenon, but a continuous and manifold spectrum.

Gibson's beaded bird sculptures extend the notion of modernist multiplicities in various ways, including the use of globally sourced beads, the contextual re-imagining of the supposed barriers between art and craft, and the bird’s anonymous form, which is more of an all-encompassing representation of “birdness” than an attempt to convey a specific ornithological order.