At Mass MoCA, Jeffrey Gibson Creates Space for Collaboration

It’s fitting that, from the opening moment of the Cherokee and Choctaw artist Jeffrey Gibson’s expansive new show at MASS MoCA, ‘POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT’, he’s rarely in the spotlight alone. On a crisp autumn afternoon in North Adams, Massachusetts, he takes the stage for a public talk with the writer and activist Albert McLeod, from the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and Metis community of Norway House in northern Manitoba. ‘Separating it into two words, it’s like the power comes from a multiplicity of things,’ Gibson says of the exhibition’s title. ‘I think it somehow feels more collective. In my mind, it’s speaking not just about one person, but about a group of beings, or some sort of grouping.’

While ‘POWER FULL’ is chock-a-block with Gibson’s signatures – the flamboyant beadwork garments, the kaleidoscopic geometries forming mirror walls and platforms, the poetic, handwritten texts –  the exhibition is also, in its own way, a group show. Gibson has chopped the institution’s 1,500-square-metre, double-height Building 5 into a quintet of zones which riff on collective institutions, including clubs, churches and collections themselves. In the first room, a booming techno soundtrack by Patrick ‘Reachout’ Coll compliments little dancefloors of fused glass panels, above which hang neon and beribboned outfits inspired by historical Lakota Ghost Dance garments and contemporary, faith-based regalia. Two-Spirit People (1991) – a documentary by Michel Beauchemin, Lori Levy and Gretchen Vogel – demands to be seen and heard from its home on a central, suspended screen. As does Your Spirit Whispers in My Ear (2024), a new documentary Gibson has woven together from submissions by dozens of Two-Spirit drag artists, activists and academics. The din is life itself.

A twisty, womblike portal intersects the vast gallery, offering a moment of reflection and anticipation. It leads to a brighter space containing more garments and platforms. Rainbow vinyl film turns the long rows of windows into prisms. If the first room was organized around documentation, here is all about production. Over the next two years or so, more than a dozen Indigenous artists will don these garments or turn those platforms into stages for their own work. ‘Laura Ortman will do field recordings in the gallery on-site,’ explains MASS MoCA Chief Curator Denise Markonish, ‘and then process those through violin and looping pedals for a performance in June. Martha Redbone is talking about organizing the funeral brass band procession known as a first line through the museum. Zoon, who is based in Winnipeg, wants to bring a teepee that he’s built and is working on songs related to that. And then, at the end of the summer, we’re going to do a dance party with MX Oops.’ Further details are still being worked out but, by opening night, guitarist and saxophonist Takiaya Reed was already activating a glowing platform, creating a doom racket with a drummer that rendered the room’s donor-class small talk over wine and cheese increasingly irrelevant. ‘It’s a volatile space to be within the colonial project, and the music is expressing  that,’ Reed said afterwards. ‘I want people to experience freedom and liberation, and I want Indigenous sovereignty to be pushed to the forefront of everything.’

It’s certainly pushed front and centre in two further rooms. A ground-floor gallery screens Gibson’s two-channel video Sometimes your body changes and you don’t remember your dreams (2024), in which he re-enacts and reinterprets a piece by performance artist and club kid Leigh Bowery. In the original, Bowery preens and poses before a mirror which blocks his view of the audience. Here, Gibson layers his own notions of regalia and movement onto Bowery, porting the community-building idea of ‘going out’ onto the spirit-raising necessity of dance in Indigenous communities. Above this, a mutable resource library is, at the moment, stocked with records of McLeod’s activism and documentation of the 1990 Annual Gathering of Native American Gays and Lesbians, at which First Nations Cree Dr Myra Laramee introduced the term Two-Spirit, along with vitrines of work by the visionary gay communist publisher Pinko, including its latest book Queer Palestine (2024).

Below, back in the heart of the bright room, a garment floats like a spirit on teepee poles latched together with deer hide. Emblazoned on its chest is the phrase: ‘All the things that led to this exact moment.’ Those same words also appeared on a bespoke garment Gibson made for the singer ANOHNI, who wore the flowing white outfit at an opening-night performance in MASS MoCA’s intimate theatre, where she ripped out the hearts of all in attendance with a series of her own songs, choice covers of Beyoncé and The Velvet Underground and video footage of liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson. In his intro, Gibson said ANOHNI’s voice is his constant companion, and the first artist he thought of for a MASS MoCA collaboration. After the show, ANOHNI will take the dress into her own world, but Gibson won’t be sad to see it go. As he told the audience, ‘I’m just so thrilled to know it’s going to have a life.’

Jeffrey Gibson’s ‘POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT’ is on view at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, until May 2025

_{Main image: Jeffrey Gibson, POWER FULL BECAUSE WE'RE DIFFERENT, 2024, film still. Courtesy: the artist}