Where Color, Culture, and Resistance Flourish: Jeffrey Gibson Reimagines Belonging at The Broad
When you step into “Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me” at The Broad, it feels as if you’ve walked through a portal into another dimension—one where history, identity, and protest are stitched in radiant beads and pulsing with color. The exhibition, which unfolds across more than thirty works including paintings, sculptures, murals, flags, and video installations, is a whirlwind of geometric pattern, beadwork, and text that rewrites erasure into affirmation. Among these, the nine-foot-tall sculpture We Want to Be Free, its torso spelled out in sparkly beads, stands like a rallying cry made corporeal—an ancestral demand that once echoed through the halls of justice.
Gibson’s work continues to confront, reclaim, and reimagine. In one immense painting, he repurposes the phrasing of a 1902 government edict—“THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT FAR TOO FREQUENTLY GOES BACK TO THE RESERVATION AND FALLS INTO THE OLD CUSTOM OF LETTING HIS HAIR GROW LONG”—transformed by vivid color and meticulous beadwork into a testament of cultural pride. Nearby, a video installation titled She Never Dances Alone multiplies a single dancer in jingle dress regalia, turning a solitary performance into a chorus of resilience.
What makes this exhibition resonate even deeper is the way Gibson weaves together lyrics, law, civil rights, poetry, and personal narrative into a single thread. A massive mural borrowed a line from Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”—Birds Flying High You Know How I Feel—while a mixed-media painting dubbed Action Now Action is Eloquence replays a famous Congressional speech from the Civil Rights era, overlaid with tribal craftsmanship and emotional urgency. It’s an expressive tumble of pop culture, historic struggle, and embodied celebration, all glossed in kaleidoscopic joy.
Opening in Los Angeles after its debut at the Venice Biennale, where Gibson was the first Indigenous artist to hold a solo U.S. exhibition, the show reasserts that belonging isn’t granted—it’s stormed. In every bead-laden bust, sculptural guardian, and vibrating mural, Gibson builds space for those whose stories too often dwell on the margins. His art, bright and defiant, asks us not just to see, but also to stand—alongside him—in that space.
