For the 2025 Facade Commission, Jeffrey Gibson (born 1972, Colorado Springs, Colorado), a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, will create four figurative sculptures—works that he refers to as ancestral spirit figures.
Gibson’s project for The Met’s Fifth Avenue facade will be the sixth in a series of commissions for the historic exterior. The artist’s new works for the niches will draw upon his longstanding and highly developed iconography, one built upon a dynamic visual language that fuses Indigenous identity and imagery with abstraction, patterning, materiality, and text.
An interdisciplinary artist who grew up in the United States, Germany, and Korea, Gibson’s expansive body of work ranges from hard-edged abstract works to a rich practice of performance and filmmaking to significant work as artist convener and curator. Since the 2000s, Gibson’s work—which incorporates Indigenous identity and imagery—has consistently reimagined new possibilities for abstraction, the use of text, and queer culture, interconnecting these formal and conceptual interests. Notably, Gibson’s work has introduced a broad range of recurring Indigenous sources, material elements, and imagery while regularly offering a critique of the reductive ways in which Indigenous culture has been historically flattened and misappropriated.
The exhibition is made possible in part by Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang, Sarah Arison, and Helen Lee-Warren and David Warren.
