Jeffrey Gibson sells cashmere blankets to raise money for Venice Pavilion

During a performance at the Aspen Art Museum in 2022, more than a dozen color guard performers rotated a flag designed by Jeffrey Gibson, an artist known for his work that fuses Indigenous identity and culture with modernism. . The artist, who grew up in the United States, Germany, and South Korea, has been incorporating flags into his interdisciplinary practice for more than a decade. Blankets also frequently appear in his artwork. Patterns and phrases are often beaded and layered onto other objects or made in the form of recycled military blankets.

Gibson, a Cherokee descendant and member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, is currently preparing to make history as the first Native American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. , a reworked flag motif is now available for sale via Sotheby’s to help finance the United States’ 2024 pavilion.

“For me, the flag represents the idea of ​​occupying a space in the model of a nation,” Gibson said in a statement. “Different types of subcultures created their own flags as a way to identify themselves.”

Created in partnership with SITE Santa Fe, the commissioning agency for the U.S. pavilion, and the Portland Art Museum, the Sotheby’s blankets are limited to 60 pieces and priced at $7,500 each. The design features brightly colored triangles and the artist’s own handwritten phrase, “I feel real when you hold me.” Gibson said the text is partly a reference to the fact that “many North American collections include objects that have been removed from communities.” “The most important thing people do when reunited with these objects is to hold on to them.”

Funding for the US Venice Biennale pavilion comes from many sources

Proceeds will support the construction of Gibson’s solo exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale, which runs from April to November. In addition to filling the U.S. Pavilion with new sculptures, paintings, and multimedia works, artists will install site-specific installations in the pavilion’s courtyard.

Representing the United States at the Venice Biennale presents financial challenges for artists and commissioners. For example, Simone Lee’s show at the American Pavilion in 2022 is estimated to cost about $7 million, while Gibson’s show is estimated to cost about $5 million, according to a report in the New York Times. The U.S. Department of State is offering a $375,000 grant to U.S. commissioning agencies to host the show, but the rest could be covered by donations and sales.

Brooke Kamin Rappaport, Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, said, “I think it was understood even before the selection process that if you applied, you could do some fundraising.” Speaking to the New York Times, he added: Biennale artists tend to be “self-selected.”

As if representing the United States at the “Olympics of the art world” wasn’t enough, Gibson was recently selected for a major commission at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The artist’s project, scheduled to be installed in 2025, includes four sculptures called Ancestral Spirit Statues, and will be the sixth work commissioned for the museum’s façade.

Alongside Gibson’s commission, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned artist Jenny C. Jones to produce a rooftop garden project using sound sculptures. “Although stylistically different, both Jones and Gibson use beauty and form to convey the potential of individual and cultural history,” Max Hollein, the museum’s director and CEO, said in a statement. “I see potential.”