Artist Jeffrey Gibson to Create Four New Sculptures for The Met's Fifth Avenue Facade

This fall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will unveil a new suite of sculptures by acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Jeffrey Gibson (born 1972, Colorado Springs, Colorado) in the niches of its Fifth Avenue facade. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson will create four figurative sculptures that reflect on the interconnected relationships between all living beings and the environment. Commissioned by the Museum, The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am will be on view from September 12, 2025, through June 9, 2026.

The exhibition is presented by Genesis.

Major support is provided by Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang, the Director’s Fund, and Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.

Additional support is provided by Sarah Arison, and Helen Lee-Warren and David Warren, and the Bronzini Vender Family.

"Jeffrey Gibson is one of the most remarkable artists of his generation and a pioneering figure within the field of native and Indigenous art," said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "These new works are based on his signature use of unconventional materials and reimagined forms to explore often overlooked histories and the natural world. We look forward to unveiling his monumental sculptures for The Met’s iconic Fifth Avenue facade."

David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, said, "Jeffrey Gibson is an artist brilliantly attuned to the varieties of life our world holds—the human, the animal, the land itself. His art vibrates and bristles with that life, the histories that never leave us, and the futures that his vision makes possible."

Gibson's project for The Genesis Facade Commission 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 world views and imagery with abstraction, patterning, materiality, and text.

This project is the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.

About the Artist

An interdisciplinary artist who grew up in the United States, Germany, and Korea, Jeffrey Gibson’s expansive body of work ranges from hard-edged abstract paintings to a rich practice of performance and filmmaking to significant work as artist convener and curator. Since the 2000s, Gibson’s work—which often incorporates Indigenous aesthetic and material traditions—has consistently revealed new modalities for abstraction, the use of text, and color, applying his formal mastery to concepts such as human connection and collective identity. Notably, Gibson’s work has introduced a broad range of recurring sources, material elements, and imagery while offering a critique of the reductive ways in which Indigenous culture has been historically flattened and misappropriated.

Recent solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me (The Broad, 2025); Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT (MASS MoCA, 2024); This Burning World: Jeffrey Gibson (ICA San Francisco, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric (SITE Santa Fe, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: They Come From Fire (Portland Art Museum, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE (deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2022); and Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (Denver Art Museum, 2018). Gibson was selected to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition, in 2024. Gibson also conceived of and co-edited the landmark volume An Indigenous Present (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Portland Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Gibson has received many distinguished awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019), and is currently an artist in residence at Bard College, in Annandale, New York. He lives and works in Hudson, New York.

Credits

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am is conceived by the artist in consultation with Jane Panetta, the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met.

The exhibition will be featured on The Met’s website, as well as on social media via the hashtags #GenesisFacadeCommission and #MetJeffreyGibson.

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June 23, 2025