This multi-media painting from 2021 was in Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition Beyond the Horizon at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. It is part of a body of work Gibson debuted in the exhibition Sweet Bitter Love at the Newberry Library, his first institutional solo show in Chicago. Gibson is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, and the exhibition was part of an initiative celebrating 40 years of the MacArthur Fellows Program.

The series to which this painting belongs marks a critical development in Gibson’s practice; he is for the first time overtly deploying appropriated figurative imagery in his work. For these paintings, he incorporates images of Indigenous people painted by the artist Elbridge Ayer Burbank (1858-1949). Burbank famously painted the portraits of more than a thousand Indigenous people. His flattened, oversimplified portrayals of his sitters diminished their complex humanity while simultaneously idealizing them as caricatures. Burbank contributed immensely to the image many Americans still have today of Indigenous people as a proud and brave, but primitive and vanishing people from the past.

Ranging from the cartoonish, to the melodramatic, to the profane, the appropriated images in the works draw attention to inherent biases within intercultural visual narratives, such as the tendency of non-Indigenous artists to attribute dark skin tones to their perceived foes and light skin to individuals, such as Pocahontas, whom they wish to convey as friendly to colonial concerns. The works deftly interrogate differences between how Native Americans represent themselves and how they are represented by others.

Interwoven into these works are 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.

These works reflect Gibson’s own meditations on how people and cultures are contextualized by history. They exemplify Gibson's deft ability to intermingle popular culture, literature, art history, memory, politics, myth, and material meaning. The source content, which he so insightfully remixes into new forms, incites questions about whose representations of people and cultures should be validated; which memories and artifacts should be exalted; what creative products should be deemed to have constructive social value; and who decides. The works feel starkly original and idiosyncratic, but unified—a phenomenological manifestation of the complex, interwoven cultural fabrics that compete within our contemporary social space, and yet keep us stubbornly, inextricably bound.