JG Audience is interesting. The way
that images and information circulate
now, you can, on one level, determine
your own audience. That said, I can
make work for people like me, which
is one place to start. When I work with
museums, I tell them that I believe
in making a show for Indigenous
audiences as well as for Indigenous
and queer audiences, but often they
express concern, like, “Where are they?
Who are they? Will they show up?” They
do, of course, in greater numbers than
institutions ever expect. But would they
have shown up before the institution
started speaking to them? Probably not,
or not a large portion of them.
I don’t think the idea of addressing
an audience is ever going to leave me.
I’m meant to be engaged with others.
I make things, that’s what I do. That’s
my role in the world. I think it’s easy
for me to want to give to people and to
encourage their joy in the present—I get
a lot of joy out of that. Somewhere in
there, in a quiet moment, I get to see it
happening and see myself experiencing
it too. I’ve also tried to make work over
the last twenty years that speaks to the
many facets of my experience, which
isn’t only rooted in Native cultures but
also in the many places I’ve lived and
the family I have. Dare I say, many intersections make up Jeffrey Gibson, and
I feel responsible to honor all of them.
AH I was hoping we’d get here. You
had a very atypical upbringing.
JG My mom and dad both grew up
in the South: in Cherokee communities
in Oklahoma and Choctaw communities in Mississippi. Great poverty. Both
of my grandfathers, Tim Wilson and
Homer Gibson, were sharecroppers at
some point. In the 1960s, each established an Indian church, both Southern
Baptist. They preached in Cherokee
and Choctaw, their languages, to their
Indigenous congregations. My mom
and dad left those communities and
went to boarding schools, and my dad
joined the Army, serving as an engineer
during the Vietnam War. Considering
the racism of the South in that period,
I think their decisions to leave were
really about safety and survival.
I was born in Colorado Springs,
where we lived for a very short period.
Then we moved to North Carolina,
where my father was a civil engineer for
the government. From there we moved
to Germany, New Jersey, Korea—I might be getting the order mixed up
there—Maryland, and then Washington,
DC. I moved to Chicago and then to
London and New York City. All those
experiences of being Native, being
American, being a foreigner, being an
indiscriminate race that nobody in the
United States nor abroad could quite
read are huge parts of my identity.
AH When did you move to New
York City?
JG In fall 1999, with Rune, my
husband. We met in graduate school
in London in 1998 and got married in
Norway before we moved.
AH So the Vikings did discover
America! (laughter) I’m from a military family, too, and military service,
in light of assimilation, was one of
the few paths available to Indigenous
people here. It can be kind of dizzying
to understand that history of military
service and assimilation alongside my
own politics and the historical saga of
my ancestors. How have you grappled
with that?
JG It’s a lot to process. I’ve experienced the conundrum you describe
in many ways in different periods of
my life. My understanding of Native
histories and their traumas got deeper
in my teens, twenties, and thirties, and
even now there are moments when I
feel I’m just beginning to understand
them on a deeper level. My grandparents’ and even my parents’ generation
could not speak of the traumatic
psychological and physical pain that
they experienced. Why could they not
speak of it? There’s a human misperception that if we don’t speak of pain,
then it will move into the past, and
we will heal. I can see now that that
is not true. People who come from a
traumatic history of colonization, we
often neglect our feelings as a defense
mechanism, but the past never really
leaves us.
I hate using the word complex,
because I feel like it doesn’t mean a
whole lot right now, but this is where
complexity really did help me understand how layered our perception of
reality can be and how little I have to
do with that. Yes, I could say that the
way that I see it is the way that it is, but
that would ignore all these other narratives through which people understand
the past. I’m interested in how the
past shows up, how what happened
hundreds of years ago continues today.
Did historical trauma disallow me—or
did I allow it to disallow me—from
establishing the voice I’m exercising
now? I hope I’m not getting too lost in
the weeds here, but I think that the way
our identities exist amid all of this is not
anyone’s sole responsibility. I’m shaped
by my environment. When I think
I’ve gained control over something or
know what I’m doing, it’s a mistake of
overconfidence.
