When artist Jeffrey Gibson reflected on the 2020 social uprising embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement and activism for Indigenous rights in Portland, Gibson knew he could create something special.
Gibson, a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw who also has Cherokee ancestry, and Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator of Native American art at Portland Art Museum, saw an opportunity to use the vacant pedestals that once held statues of problematic and glorified presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. They wanted to reclaim those spaces with visual rhetoric and performance. Gibson and Ash-Milby, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, were surprised when 138 people showed up to a call for portrait subjects. With so many willing participants, Gibson and photographer Brian Barlow, spent three full days photographing children, distinguished elders, LGBTQ+ artists and activists.
“I didn’t tell anyone to bring anything, the only thing I asked of them was to present themselves the way they wished to be seen,” said Gibson.
The outcome — a series of portraits that radiate with transformative energy — reveals the sense of kinship that exists in Indigenous communities.
“Everything made sense and everything came together,” Ash-Milby said.
The central courtyard at the Portland Art Museum is covered with black and white portraits of the 138 Indigenous, BIPOC and LGBTQ community participants in Gibson’s photo exhibit, “They Come From Fire.” Twelve luminescent, text-filled glass panels cast kaleidoscopic shadows onto the walls, seeming to bring the photos to life.
“When we took the photographs and looked at them all together, we were like, “This could exist anywhere,’” Gibson said. “These images could speak to so many other places, not just Portland.”
