Jeffrey Gibson, BECAUSE ONCE YOU ENTER MY HOUSE, IT BECOMES OUR HOUSE: Socrates Sculpture Park | Queens, NY

In this turbulent moment when we find ourselves reevaluating American identity and values, the MONUMENTS NOW exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park seeks to address the role of monuments in society and commemorate underrepresented narratives such as diasporic, Indigenous, and queer histories.

MONUMENTS NOW evolves over three cumulative parts. Part I opens summer 2020 with major new commissions for contemporary monuments by acclaimed artists Jeffrey Gibson, Paul Ramírez Jonas, and Xaviera Simmons. 

Jeffrey Gibson’s project for the MONUMENTS NOW exhibition, Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House, serves as an homage to ingenuity of Indigenous North American peoples and cultures, to pre-Columbian Mississippian architecture, and to queer camp aesthetics. Gibson designed the multi-tiered structure to reference the earthen architecture of the ancient metropolis of Cahokia, which was the largest city of the North American Indigenous Mississippian people at its height in the thirteenth century. The earth mound of the pre-Columbian ziggurat is represented in Gibson’s multi-tiered monument with a plywood structure adorned with a vibrant surface of wheat-pasted posters. The posters integrate geometric designs inspired by the Serpent Mound located in Ohio, another monument of the Mississippi Valley, alongside texts that operate as activist slogans. Gibson also curated Indigenous led performances to activate the structure over the course of the installation.

– Curatorial text courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park