Walking through Jeffrey Gibson’s extraordinary installation, “This Is the Day,” you hear an echo from the first Americans: “Send them Back.”
Gibson, a gay Native American artist, draws inspiration from the Ghost Dance Movement of the 1890’s, a religious movement that united the Plains Indians in the hope their rituals would banish the white settlers and the U.S. government from their lands.
In one of America’s blackest moments, the tribes’ community terrified the U.S. Army. Fear trumped any better angels, and we are left with the massacre at Wounded Knee.
But this is not the story Gibson tells. He invites everyone to the party, mixing old trading post blankets with Biblical verses and lines from pop tunes. He moves us forward.
“Somehow the past has to situate itself within the present.”
Jeffrey Gibson
“This Is the Day” asks us to come up with a better ending to a story riddled with fear and racism.
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
Ben Okri
“This Is the Day” is at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas through September, courtesy of Hamilton College’s Wellin Museum of Art. All the photographs are courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson and the Wellin Museum.