Let the Chaos Happen A N I N T E RV I E W W I T H J E F F R E Y G I B SO N Sweet Bitter Love, presenting artist Jeffrey Gibson’s reflections on representations of Indigenous peoples in cultural institutions, is on display at the Newberry through September 18. Responding to a series of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portraits by Eldridge Ayer Burbank in the Newberry collection, Gibson (a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent) refutes the stereotypical imagery that has reinforced pernicious myths about Indigenous people for centuries. As they enter into critical dialogue
with the collections of the Newberry and the Field Museum, Gibson’s works attest to the resilience of Indigenous cultures. Analú López (Guachichil/Xi´úi), Ayer Indigenous Studies Librarian at the Newberry, recently spoke with Gibson about his evolution as an artist, the challenges of presenting the complexity of the past through art, and how his work might surface silenced voices in library and museum collections. The following text has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sweet Bitter Love is a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Newberry Library. It is an initiative of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, which is organized by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with exhibition, programmatic, and research partners across Chicago. Presented on the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause features new and recontextualized work by more than twenty-eight visual artists, including Jeffrey Gibson, who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981. Toward Common Cause is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and curated by Abigail Winograd, MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago.
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Spring/Summer 2021
