Throwback Thursday- Jeffrey Gibson’s “Alive” for Desert X 2017

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Palm Springs, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 232023
 

ALIVE! by artist Jeffrey Gibson was created for the first edition of the biennial Desert X in 2017, and is on view in the sculpture garden of the Palm Springs Art Museum.

It was recently announced that Gibson was selected by the U.S. State Department to represent the country at the 2024 Venice Biennale. He is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, and will be the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the event.

The artist’s statement about the work from the Desert X site-

ALIVE! is a found object ready made sculpture altered with paint and text that reads: I am alive! You are alive! They are alive! We are living!

I chose to work with a wind turbine blade because of how it alters one’s perceptions when they look out across the desert landscape. They are enormous and when viewing one up close you get a sense of the expansiveness of the desert landscape that they occupy. They are also really beautiful in form and their shape reminds me of something like a wing, a fin, or a bone from a massive whale. The text references the people who live in Palm Springs and the original indigenous people who occupied this land and their belief that the landscape is living.

Throwback Thursday- Edgar Heap of Birds at MoMA NYC in 2021

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Painting / Painters, Printmaking
Nov 172023
 

Above is Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds’s work Surviving Active Shooter Custer, 48 monoprints, 2018, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, on view in 2021.

From the museum about the work-

The term “active shooter” is one we hear too often in today’s news. Here, Heap of Birds uses this contemporary phrase to characterize massacres committed by United States troops against Native Americans in the 1800s. Each of this work’s panels contains six lines of text evoking the violence of not only this country’s history but ongoing acts of oppression against Indigenous communities. The prints on the right are “ghost prints” of those on the left, made by using the residual ink remaining on the printing plate after the first print was produced. For the artist, these prints recall the “ghosts of a whole culture.”

In the video below from the museum, the artist discusses the work with two of MoMa’s curators.

John Nieto’s “Taos Buffalo” at The James Museum in St. Pete

 Art, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County, St. Pete
Nov 292022
 

Taos Buffalo,1991, by John Nieto can currently be seen at The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art, in St. Petersburg, Florida.

From the museum’s information plaque-

With vivid fields of color and strong lines, Nieto paints familiar imagery and expresses it the way he sees it. He spent most of his life in New Mexico, inspired by the light, land, and rich history of the region.

“The colors I work with are a reflection of the way I feel. Sometimes I literally see these colors up in the sky, and it is unbelievable for people who don’t live in this area (near Santa Fe). When I am painting, I feel a certain way, and I feel it in terms of a certain color. So I put it down, then that suggests another color.” -John Nieto