Tyrese Gibson faces one charge of cruelty to animals stemming from a September incident in Fulton County, Ga., that left a neighbor’s 5-year-old dog mauled and dead.
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office booked the 46-year-old singer-actor, a staple in the “Fast and Furious” film franchise, on Friday. He was released on a $20,000 surety bond. Attorney Gabe Banks said in a statement that Gibson voluntarily turned himself “to answer for a misdemeanor warrant.”
“Despite what others might say, throughout this entire process Mr. Gibson has cooperated fully with legal authorities and will continue to do so until this matter is resolved,” Banks said. “Mr. Gibson once again wants to extend his deepest condolences to the family who lost their dog and respectfully asks for privacy and understanding as this matter is handled through the appropriate legal channels.”
Police said earlier this week that Gibson failed to turn himself into law enforcement after an arrest warrant was issued stemming from a violent incident involving the actor’s Cane Corso dogs. On the night of Sept. 18, a neighbor of the “Morbius” star let her small spaniel out to her yard and returned five minutes later to find the dog had been attacked. The dog was rushed to a veterinary hospital but did not survive, police said.
The Cane Corsos were then seen at the house, where the owner called police, saying she was afraid to go outside. Animal control officers responded and were able to keep the dogs back while the neighbor went to her vehicle.
The arrest warrant issued for the movie star was part of an “ongoing issue” following multiple calls about the dogs in the last few months, Fulton County Police Capt. Nicole Dwyer said. Gibson received multiple warnings before the warrant was issued, and police also attempted to cite him before the attack, Dwyer said, but Gibson was not at his Atlanta home.
Police had a search warrant for Gibson’s property on Sept. 22, but the actor and the dogs were not there.
In a statement shared to the actor’s Instagram page on Wednesday, Gibson and Banks expressed condolences to the family “who lost their beloved dog in this tragic incident.” The “Transformers” and “Baby Boy” star said his heart “is truly broken,” the note said, and that “he has been “praying for the family constantly, hoping they may one day find it in their hearts to forgive him.”
The statement said that the attack occurred while Gibson, who “accepts full responsibility for his dogs,” was out of town. The actor has since rehomed the two adult dogs and their three puppies, the statement said, adding “the liability of keeping them was simply too great.”
Gibson also issued a personal statement, describing his passion for dogs and declaring that his animals have “never been trained to harm.” He said he has been in Los Angeles with family, mourning the death of his father.
“Please know that I am praying for you, grieving with you, and will continue to face this tragedy with honesty, responsibility, and compassion,” he added.
In another Instagram statement shared Tuesday, Banks explained that Gibson’s decision to bring the Cane Corso dogs into his home was for security against stalkers who had been “randomly showing up at his home” in recent years. Banks said that the dogs “never harmed a child, a person, or another dog” until the September incident.
Gibson said Tuesday: “I had no idea I would ever wake up to this nightmare, and I know the family must feel the same way. To them, please know that my heart is broken for you. I am praying for your healing and for your beloved pet, who never deserved this. I remain committed to facing this matter with honesty, responsibility, and compassion.”
“You’re in this now! You’ve got a lot of work to do!”
The gravelly voice was unmistakably Kirk Gibson. The object of his growl was a journalist who spent two years battling him on the Dodgers beat.
Only this time, Gibby wasn’t yelling at me. This time, he was cheering for me.
“I’m fighting it, you gotta fight it! You gotta take it head-on, because this s— ain’t going away!”
Kirk Gibson plays ping pong at the Kirk Gibson Center for Parkinson’s Wellness in Farmington Hills, Mich., on Sept. 26.
(Nic Antaya/Nic Antaya / For the Times)
Thirty-five years after we sparred in the Dodger clubhouse, Gibson and I have found ourselves on the same team.
We both have Parkinson’s Disease, and he spent much of a recent 45-minute phone call pushing me to battle the incurable illness the way he once battled a certain backdoor slider.
Kirk Gibson’s game-winning home run from Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.
For many, an indelible memory. But in many ways, he’s no longer the same Kirk Gibson.
In 2015, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a progressive neurological disorder that affects movement.
Today, his home-run gait around the bases would be wobbly, and his right fist pumps would be shaky, and afterward he might need help in the locker room buttoning his shirt.
But one thing that has remained powerful is his fire.
“You battle through it!”
He is battling it such that this fall, he will hit another monumental home run, this one far more impactful than any previous October blast.
There are few places in the country quite like it — this giant, 30,000-square feet warehouse dedicated to Parkinson’s patients, complete with two gyms, 11 spaces for movement classes, a track, a social space and even quiet rooms for those experiencing the off times that occur during those dreaded gaps in the daily medication.
Catherine Yu leads a tai chi class at the Kirk Gibson Center for Parkinson’s Wellness in Farmington Hills, Mich.
(Nic Antaya/Nic Antaya / For the Times)
And it’s all free. For everyone. All the time.
“It was fun to hit the home run, but this involves a lot more people,” Gibson said. “We’re trying to create a culture where people with Parkinson’s can thrive. Instead of sitting home being depressed, you come out and occupy your mind and participate in classes and deal with your life.”
Gibson is so ingrained in his created community that he has an office in the middle of the building and shows up nearly every day to coach a most unlikely looking squad.
“We’re not a good-looking group, but we’re a great group,” he said. “We’re a bunch of people moving around, shaking, some have walkers, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re a beautiful bunch.”
When Gibson gives speeches, he asks the audience to identify their own personal World Series. Gibson was a Fall Classic hero in 1984 and 1988, but it’s clear, his World Series is here, his World Series is now, and as he strongly encouraged me in my situation, you could almost hear the drumbeat of October.
“Fight it! Take it head on!”
The night Kirk Gibson made Dodger history, he did so alone. Because he was certain leg injuries would prevent him from playing in the 1988 World Series opener, he sent his family home before the game. When he hit his historic blast, he was unable to share it with loved ones, so it didn’t seem real.
Dodgers star Kirk Gibson raises his arm in celebration as he rounds the bases after hitting a two–run game-winning homer in the bottom of the ninth inning to beat the Oakland Athletics 5–4 in the first game of the World Series at Dodger Stadium on Oct. 15, 1988.
(AP)
“All these years, I didn’t really know what happened,” he said. “I never really felt it.”
“When he made that call, that put it all in perspective,” Gibson said. “He took that moment and made it what it had been all those years. I got it, and I was handing it off to Freddie, and I was so honored.”
Gibson said his Parkinson’s diagnosis, which was made official in 2015 after his left arm became glued to his side, has made him appreciate every small wonder.
“After all these years of gruffness … I’ve changed,” he said. “It’s like you’re living a different life.”
Several years ago Gibson was playing golf with an Australian businessman who had no idea that Gibson was once a baseball and football star. Steve Annear was struck by Gibson’s devotion to seeking a Parkinson’s cure, which had become the focus of the Kirk Gibson Foundation.
“Here was this popular athlete who could have been doing anything,” said Annear. “But he was spending his time helping other people. I so admired him.”
Steve Annear, CEO of the Kirk Gibson Foundation, left, stands beside former Dodgers star Kirk Gibson in front of a pool table at the Kirk Gibson Center for Parkinson’s Wellness in Farmington Hills, Mich.
(Nic Antaya/Nic Antaya / For the Times)
Annear, an amputee who recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with the sort of fighting spirit that first attracted Gibson, became CEO and director of the foundation. Their team came up with the idea of a wellness center in 2023, raised $27 million to build it and construction was completed in July. In the process, it became obvious that Gibson’s approach was different.
The legendarily abrasive superstar? It had been replaced by a more sensitive soul, one who will give impromptu pep talks to anyone he encounters who is clearly suffering from Parkinson’s, whether it be in an airport terminal or grocery store checkout line.
”There’s no doubt that Parkinson’s has humbled Gibby,” said Annear. “He is selfless, very determined, very passionate, all about other people.”
Nearly 900 folks have already registered to become members during a recent soft launch, and Gibson has joined them in their daily activities, doing everything from playing pool to taking spin classes
”What’s always mattered most to Kirk is the team, and this is his new team,” said Annear. “The center is his new locker room, and the attendees, the administrators, the staff, they’re all his new teammates.”
Not that he has forgotten his old teams, as a large cutout of Gibson celebrating in a Detroit Tigers uniform can be found in the center. With help from the great Peter O’Malley, Gibson will also soon decorate a room with Tommy Lasorda’s legendary Vero Beach dinner table.
“The way this has all come together is unbelievable,” said Gibson. “It’s divine intervention.”
Just the other day, Gibson was getting a haircut when somebody walked up and handed him $300 for the wellness center.
”We’re trying to help as many people as possible,” he said. “I hate going to the doctor, I hate going to the hospital. The wellness center isn’t anything like that. It’s a cool place.”
Like everyone with Parkinson’s, Gibson has his good days and bad days. Life is not measured by how one falls, but how one gets back up.
Two years ago while fishing in Alaska, Gibson tumbled out of the boat. This year he didn’t.
“I’m pretty proud of that,” he said.
Kirk Gibson sits alongside signs greeting visitors at the Kirk Gibson Center for Parkinson’s Wellness in Farmington Hills, Mich.
(Nic Antaya/Nic Antaya / For the Times)
Rarely has he felt the pride he will feel on Oct. 6 when, with the formal opening of the Kirk Gibson Center for Parkinson’s Wellness, baseball’s ultimate competitor once again creating the impossible out of the improbable.
“I don’t get scared,” said Gibson. “I attack.”
And so he ended our conversation by strongly urging me to fly cross country and visit his center, to be enriched and educated and basically get my Parkinson’s-laden butt moving.
I told him I would try. The phone exploded in my hands.
“Try? You know what Lasorda always said. ‘I could get a truck driver to try!’ Don’t just try! Do it!”
It’s been more than 60 years since Utah backed a Democrat for president. The state’s last Democratic U.S. senator left office nearly half a century ago and the last Utah Democrat to serve in the House lost his seat in 2020.
Late last month, a judge tossed out the state’s slanted congressional lines and ordered Utah’s GOP-run Legislature to draw a new political map, ruling that lawmakers improperly thumbed their noses and overrode voters who created an independent redistricting commission to end gerrymandering.
It’s a welcome pushback against the growing pattern of lawmakers arrogantly ignoring voters and pursuing their preferred agenda. You don’t have to be a partisan to think that elections should matter and when voters express their will it should be honored.
Otherwise, what’s the point of holding elections?
Anyhow, redistricting. Did you ever dream you’d spend this much time thinking about the subject? Typically, it’s an arcane and extremely nerdy process that occurs once a decade, after the census, and mainly draws attention from a small priesthood of line-drawing experts and political obsessives.
Suddenly, everyone is fixated on congressional boundaries, for which we can thank our voraciously self-absorbed president.
Trump started the whole sorry gerrymandering business — voters and democracy be damned — by browbeating Texas into redrawing its congressional map to try to nab Republicans as many as five additional House seats in 2026. The paranoid president is looking to bolster his party ahead of a tough midterm election, when Democrats need to gain just three seats to win a House majority and attain some measure of control over Trump’s rogue regime.
Meantime, the political race to the bottom continues.
Lawmakers in Republican-run Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Ohio may tear up their congressional maps in favor of partisan gerrymanders, and Democrats in Illinois and New York are being urged to do the same.
When all is said and done, 10 or so additional seats could be locked up by one party or the other, even before a single ballot is cast; this when the competitive congressional map nationwide has already shrunk to a postage stamp-sized historic low.
If you think that sort of pre-baked election and voter obsolescence is a good thing, you might consider switching your registration to Russia or China.
Utah, at least, offers a small ray of positivity.
In 2018, voters there narrowly approved Proposition 4, taking the map-drawing process away from self-interested lawmakers and creating an independent commission to handle redistricting. In 2021, the Republican-run Legislature chose to ignore voters, gutting the commission and passing a congressional map that allowed the GOP to easily win all four of Utah’s House seats.
The trick was slicing and dicing Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, the state’s most populous and densely packed, and scattering its voters among four predominantly Republican districts.
“There’s always going to be someone who disagrees,” Carson Jorgensen, the chairman of the Utah Republican Party, said airily as lawmakers prepared to give voters their middle finger.
In July 2024, Utah’s five Supreme Court justices — all Republican appointees — found that the Legislature’s repeal and replacement of Proposition 4 was unconstitutional. The ruling kicked the case over to Salt Lake County District Judge Dianna Gibson, who on Aug. 25 rejected the partisan maps drawn by GOP lawmakers.
Cue the predictable outrage.
“Monday’s Court Order in Utah is absolutely Unconstitutional,” Trump bleated on social media. “How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?”
In Gibson’s case, the answer is her appointment by Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican who would be considered a radical leftist in the same way a hot fudge sundae could be described as diet food.
Others offered the usual condemnation of “judicial activism,” which is political-speak for whenever a court decision doesn’t go your way.
“It’s a terrible day … for the rule of law,” lamented Utah’s Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who is apparently concerned with legal proprieties only insofar as they serve his party’s president and the GOP, having schemed with Trump allies in their failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
In a ruling last week rejecting lawmakers’ request to pause her decision, Gibson wrote that “Utah has an opportunity to be different.”
“While other states are currently redrawing their congressional maps to intentionally render some citizen votes meaningless, Utah could redesign its congressional plan with the intention to protect its citizens’ right to vote and to ensure that each citizen’s vote is meaningful.”
That’s true. Utah can not only be different from other states, as Gibson suggested.
Josie Gibson shares her thoughts on Olivia Attwood’s latest presenting role on This Morning amid huge backlash by trolls as some threaten to boycott show
16:19, 01 Aug 2025Updated 16:19, 01 Aug 2025
Josie Gibson Olivia Attwood over This Morning job(Image: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock)
Josie Gibson has hit back at trolls in defence of Olivia Attwood after she became the victim of cruel jibes following her new presenting role on This Morning. Fans of the ITV daytime TV show have even threatened to boycott the show reportedly due to her rise to fame from Love Island, in 2017.
The 34 year old TV personality, who has since gone on to be a panellist on Loose Women and host her own podcast, had appeared on the third series of the reality TV show. But Olivia is not the first person to have a reality TV background, so too has Josie Gibson, Alison Hammond and Rylan Clark.
In an interview with The Sun, the mum of one who appeared on Big Brother in 2010, said: “Oh my God she’s brilliant. It’s brilliant she gets to do this and I think she’s really good. Yeah, really good. Honestly, you get some backlash like that in this industry and I really don’t know why people do it.”
She added: “I’ll never understand why people do it, you know. To me, I’ve always loved to see people do well and I genuinely love it. I love it when people succeed and I want to bring everybody up and make sure everybody has a go on the horses, do you know what I mean? “
While on This Morning to discuss her new TV show The Price of Perfection in June, Olivia revealed her news to hosts Cat Deeley and Ben Shepherd.
Olivia Attwood lands new presenting role on This Morning
Engineering the conversation, Ben told the former Love Island star “We’ve got some big news about This Morning and you in the summer.”
In response Olivia said: “I have some news yes, it’s very exciting. I’ll be joining you guys on the hosting team on the other side of the sofa.”
The TV duo then gestured for Olivia to sit on their side of the sofa to “feel what it’s like.”
Getting up to switch her seat, the newbie said: “This is even more surreal.”
Complimenting the new addition to the presenting team, Cat said: “We look amazing together.” And this prompted Olivia to ask Cat: “Shall we do a show together?”
The Loose Women panellist add more detail to her announcement as she said: “So it’s a couple of shows, I’m very excited, it’s a huge honour. I’ve grown up watching this show, and being part of the ITV presenting team with Loose Women has been a great experience so this just feels like a very natural progression.”
Olivia was brought in to replace Ben and Cat when they take time off for their six week holiday.
But her new role divided fans. One person wrote: “So Attwood is going to be co-hosting #ThisMorning over the summer. FFS like we don’t get enough of her on #Loosewomen, surprised they haven’t asked that talentless Sam Thompson to step in as well!”
Another added: “How many more viewers do they want to lose? Attwood joining the team is really poor decision.”
A third said: “Just when you think the presenters can’t get any worse they decide to take on Olivia Attwood.”
Meanwhile a fourth penned: “Well done … That’s another step downhill for this show! I wonder who else will be hosting over the summer?”
But not everyone thought her inclusion was a bad idea. One fan of the ITV show wrote: “It’s great that Olivia Attwood will be a presenter on This Morning, she’ll be fantastic.”
And a second said: “Love Olivia, will definitely be tuning in.”
In 2019, Jeffrey Gibson received a MacArthur Fellowship, the $625,000 award commonly called “the genius grant” that buys recipients the freedom to follow their dreams.
Gibson used the money to purchase art materials and hire studio assistants. He took a two-year hiatus from teaching and spent more time reading. Best of all, he could afford to focus on the exquisitely crafted and increasingly ambitious art — supercharged with bold patterns, bright colors, poetic messages and mesmerizing textures — coming out of his studio in upstate New York, near the town of Hudson, where he lives with his husband, artist Rune Olsen, and their children, 9-year-old Gigi and 5-year-old Phoenix.
A sequence of critically acclaimed — and wildly popular — exhibitions followed: “When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2020, “The Body Electric” at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico in 2022, “The Spirits Are Laughing” at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado that same year, “They Teach Love” at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University in 2023 and “Power Full Because We’re Different” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2024.
The pace of Gibson’s exhibitions was relentless. He gained energy and momentum from reaching larger audiences, and he became a passionate advocate for issues dear to his heart, speaking particularly in terms of power and beauty, and the ways those forces have played out — and continue to play out — in the democratic experiment that is the United States of America.
All of that culminated in 2023, when the State Department selected Gibson to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. There are few higher honors for an American artist, and Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians who also is of Cherokee descent, was the first Indigenous artist selected to fill that role. Other Indigenous artists, often unnamed, had represented the U.S. only once before — mostly with pottery, jewelry and textiles — as part of a group exhibition. That was in 1932, when Pueblo artists Ma Pe Wi and Tonita Peña and Hopi artist Fred Kabotie also exhibited their paintings.
Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennial transformed the neoclassical U.S. Pavilion with dramatic works like this beaded piece, which is part of the forthcoming show at the Broad museum in downtown L.A.
(Timothy Schenck)
“Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me” transformed the exterior and the interior of the neoclassical U.S. Pavilion in Venice into a vibrant stage that invited people from all walks of life to interact with the cornucopia of works. Visitors couldn’t help but discover something wonderful, whether it be a giant, stylized bird, festooned with thousands of glistening beads; a laser-sharp painting, composed of up to 290 supersaturated colors; an array of lavishly patterned flags, from places no one has ever visited; or an evocative phrase, lifted from a novel, a pop song, a poem or a document, such as the U.S. Constitution. A pair of 9-foot-tall figures looked like they had just stepped off a spaceship — or out of a psychedelic fever dream. And a trio of murals, measuring up to 18-by-40 feet, provided an intergalactic backdrop, welcoming aliens of all stripes.
That historic, well-received exhibition in Italy — “Identity politics has never looked this joyful,” read the review from the Times of London — has come to Los Angeles. Gibson’s first solo show in a Southern California museum opens May 10 in the lobby and first-floor galleries of the Broad.
Hypnotically colorful artworks by Jeffrey Gibson in the U.S. Pavilion of the 2024 Venice Bienniale.
(Timothy Schenck)
Detail of Jeffrey Gibson’s Venice Bienniale artworks, which have been reinstalled at L.A.’s Broad museum.
(Timothy Schenck)
All of the works that filled the pavilion in Venice will be at the Broad, installed to let visitors circulate freely through a layered labyrinth of figures and forms — some familiar, others disconcerting. A pair of sculptures, displayed five years ago in Gibson’s Brooklyn Museum exhibition, has been added.
For “When Fire Is a Applied to a Stone It Cracks” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2020, Jeffrey Gibson installed moccasins to an early 20th century bronze by Charles Cary Rumsey titled “The Dying Indian.”
(Jonathan Dorado)
The larger of the two is a monumental bronze figure on horseback, cast by Beaux-Arts sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey in the first decade of the 20th century and titled “The Dying Indian.” It depicts a generic Native American man astride an emaciated horse. Shoulders slouched, head bowed and wearing nothing but a pair of moccasins, the dying Indian is an emblem of extinction — or extermination.
To counteract that narrative, Gibson commissioned Pawnee-Cree artist John Little Sun Murie to create a pair of beaded moccasins emblazoned with a line from a Roberta Flack song: “I’m gonna run with every minute I can borrow.” While giving symbolic comfort to the bronze figure, the buckskin moccasins tell a story of grassroots resistance and DIY defiance, in which beauty and comfort and love have a toehold, even in a world otherwise defined by injustice and suffering.
Artist Jeffrey Gibson.
(Matthew Cavanaugh / For The Times)
“The space in which to place me” comes at a fraught moment for artists and their art, and Gibson is acutely aware of where his work stands in the current political climate.
“To me it’s almost whiplash going from Venice to what’s going on at the Smithsonian now,” Gibson says, referring to the public-private institution that includes the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Under pressure from the Trump administration, the Smithsonian closed its Office of Diversity and is targeted by the president for “race-centered ideology” that he deems “improper” under an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“I don’t want to say it’s actually hard to reckon, because I’m not sure that it is that hard to reckon,” Gibson says. “I think that, in this moment, we have no distance. We have no objective distance from what we’re experiencing right now. And so there’s no way for me to be able to understand all of the circumstances that led to where we’re at.”
Detail of Gibson’s work at the Venice Bienniale.
(Timothy Schenck)
When Gibson looks at the present, he sees it as part of history, reaching back further than the divisiveness that has defined American politics for the last couple of decades. “When we look at other moments in history, you see so clearly how events and attitudes and interests aligned for those moments to happen.”
Gibson is convinced that, in the future, when we can see the present in retrospect, we will see that the current turmoil is actually business as usual.
Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager of the Broad, puts it this way: “The show takes a long view of history. It’s not reactive. It’s not about the past 10, 20, or however many years. It’s really looking all the way back.
“In this moment, that is refreshing. It is also necessary for us to ground ourselves in this longer view, this longer arc, and really think about the role of history, and how that affects the present and the future.”
Gibson photographed earlier this month at his studio in upstate New York.
(Matthew Cavanaugh / For The Times)
Jeffrey Gibson was born in 1972 in Colorado Springs, Colo., and he grew up in West Germany and South Korea, where his father worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, supplying goods to military bases.
In 1995, Gibson earned his bachelor’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago. As an undergrad, he had worked at the Field Museum, on the staff established by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which returned sacred objects and human remains to their respective tribes.
After receiving his master of fine arts degree from the Royal College of Art in London in 1998 — funded in part by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians — Gibson moved to New York City, where he, like many young artists, struggled to find his voice, struggled to find an audience for his art and struggled to find time to make art between day jobs at Macy’s and Ikea.
By 2011, Gibson was frustrated by all of the struggles and considered abandoning art. But a 2012 two-gallery exhibition in New York, titled “one becomes the other” and presented at Participant Inc. and American Contemporary, redeemed his commitment to art-making. For the first time Gibson collaborated with other Indigenous artists, who specialized in beading, drum-making and silver engraving. It was also the first time he felt that people understood what he was up to as an artist.
Interest in his work spread swiftly. Solo exhibitions at public venues around the country followed: “Love Song” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2013, “Speak to Me” at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in 2017, “Like a Hammer” at the Denver Art Museum in 2018 and “I Was Here” at the Des Moines Art Center in 2019.
He was 48 when he got the MacArthur.
For Venice, Gibson dreamed big. Rather than proposing what he thought was practical, or acceptable, or typical, he proposed what he wanted to see — in his most freewheeling imaginings, with no compromises or constraints. From June 2023, when he found out that his exhibition proposal had been selected, to April 2024, when his exhibition opened, he says, “I was prepared the entire time for people to call me and say, about every element of the installation, ‘We just can’t do that,’ or ‘It’s just not possible.’ And I have to say, that didn’t happen.”
That’s a testament to the team Gibson had assembled, which ultimately consisted of 180 people. Chief among them were Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum, and Abigail Winograd, an independent curator, as well as Louis Grachos, executive director of SITE Santa Fe. Gibson’s exhibition was co-commissioned by SITE Santa Fe and the Portland museum.
A rainbow of beads form a dreadlocked bust, one of Gibson’s works on view at the Venice Bienniale.
(Timothy Schenck)
“What’s so amazing about Jeffrey is that he draws on so many different realms for his work, from Indigenous histories to American queer culture, all the while exploring identities and diversity,” Grachos says, “He is an exceptionally sophisticated colorist, a great communicator and an effective educator. In the end, Jeffrey is the absolute, consummate humanist.”
Looking back at the year leading up to the Venice opening and the year that followed, Gibson has a deep appreciation of the value of time — and how long it takes to make sense of things. And that worries him deeply about the world we live in.
“We have created a culture that is overwhelming for a human being,” Gibson says. “And that overwhelming causes anxiety. It causes fear. It causes a real, not just a perceived, sense of instability. And when we feel completely unstable, the first thing we want to do is revert to something that we think we understand. We’ve taken away the ability to feel that we have the space for comprehension, the space to process and to understand.”
When face-to-face understanding gives way to stereotypes developed from a distance, Gibson says, the battle is lost. “We are again conjuring fear. And that fear ultimately sits in the soul as resentment. That resentment is going to show up. So when I look at the world right now, I think what I really see is fear.”
Gibson’s art is all about making a place in the world where fear — the feeling of being overwhelmed by the speed and volume of modern life, the seemingly intractable political divide, the malignant racism that plagues the nation — has no toehold, much less a leg to stand on.
Gibson’s exhibition is a remedy for those who sometimes feel powerless and pointless. His exuberant, color-saturated installation serves up an abundance of beauty, awe, astonishment and fun. It stimulates the senses and inspires the mind. Most of all, it uplifts. The experience is the opposite of what one feels by the image glut and sound bites of modern life, the psychologically destabilizing ether of digital distractions that can oppress the soul.
“I think that analog-world engagement is crucial,” Gibson says. “I make work that’s very much about being a living being in this world, which I see as phenomenal. And I wish for people that they could understand how phenomenal the world around us is.”
“We Want to Be Free,” courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio, will be on view in the upcoming Broad museum exhibition.
(A garment of flowing yellow, orange and yellow carries the beaded message “ We want to be free.”)
Until recently, Gibson had not realized how important working with textiles and making garments would be to him. “When displayed,” he says, “the garments become a kind of banner, a kind of flag.”
They evoke the regalia worn by ghost dancers, papal robes and the outfits created by such performance artists as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Hermann Nitsch and Hélio Oiticica. They also recall the homemade clothes of punks and skaters.
“The garment is really a mechanism for transformation,” Gibson says. “You become someone other in the garment. It’s a way of extracting yourself from mass consumer culture. And all of those things just really fascinated me to want to think about an alternative, progressive, very inclusive army.”
The repetitive nature of weaving and beading and hands-on craftsmanship are important to Gibson. “The routine is healing,” he says.
During an earlier visit to Venice, Gibson was struck by gorgeous, fully beaded dresses made centuries ago. “They were made under some periods of tremendous distress,” he says. “I wondered why anybody, under those conditions, decided to make a beautiful, beaded dress. Why was beauty so important? And that question — Why beauty? — is still with me. The only answer I can come up with is that, in a weird way, beauty is a manifestation of hope.”
“I’m not a religious person per se, but more and more I feel that faith, in its broadest definition, is crucial,” Gibson says.
(Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Times)
Gibson also notes that the handing down of a treasured object to a family member or community member “is really a way of manifesting a future. It may be a small gesture, but it’s powerful.”
That’s how he looks at his life as an artist: “It all starts at a much smaller scale. It starts in childhood. It starts with socialization. It starts with people having examples of equity and fairness to mimic. If you have those examples, you really lessen the degree of violence that we see in society today.
“I know that’s not a sexy story. But I think that those things are within my control. I’m not a religious person per se, but more and more I feel that faith, in its broadest definition, is crucial. Right now. I just think that once you lose faith, hope, love — I mean, I don’t know what’s left.”
‘Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me’
Where: The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., L.A. When: May 10-Sept. 28; closed Mondays Admission: $12-$15 for this special exhibition; kids 17 and younger are free Information: (213) 232-6200, thebroad.org
