On Monday, May 19, Director Marla Price announced the acquisition of artworks by four artists — Jeffrey Gibson, Gabriel Orozco, Howardena Pindell, and Dyani White Hawk—for the Modern’s permanent collection.
“I’m Not Perfect” is part of Jeffrey Gibson’s punching bag series. ((photo via Marc Straus Gallery)
Gibson is a queer indigenous artist whose sculptural piece “I’m Not Perfect (2014)” is now part of The Modern. The artist was recently featured at Washington State University’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art for the They Teach Love exhibition.
Currently, he is repping the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale, an international contemporary art exhibition on display since last month through this November.
From The Modern:
Jeffery Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, Colorado) champions overlooked narratives to create reflections of contemporary life. Of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, Gibson fuses Indigenous cultures and histories with references to pop culture, art history, and ideas about gender. This amalgamation of source material is evident throughout the artist’s installations, paintings, and sculptures.
“I’m Not Perfect” was included in the artist’s 2018–19 retrospective This Is the Day and is part of his punching bag series. Gibson intricately adorns the found boxing equipment with glass beads and tin jingles. An object typically associated with aggression, action, and emotional release is transformed into a multilayered reexamination of masculinity and Indigenous ceremonies.
Additional pop culture and art references are evident in the sculpture. The eponymous embroidery around the top of the punching bag directly cites the title of a 1986 song by Grace Jones. In the music video, the 1980s icon undergoes beauty treatments to conform to contemporary standards of perfection. Ultimately, she victoriously reasserts her intrinsic value while wearing a skirt designed by Keith Haring. By combining the message of Jones’s song with symbols relating to his gender and cultural background, Gibson creates a nuanced meditation on a twenty-first-century man’s interior journey.
All four works are currently on view in the Modern’s first-floor galleries.
“Ranging across painting, mixed media, and sculpture, these four distinct works are indicative of each artist’s oeuvre, and we are honored to add them to our collection,” Price said in Monday’s announcement.
In other art news, local gay artist Armando Sebastian was among those named by the Dallas Museum of Art as a recipient of the 2024 Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant. The grant will support “travel across Europe; to Japan’s three major mountains—Mount Fuji, Mount Haku, and Mount Tate—and the artisans of Echizen Village to explore Japanese papermaking practices; to Europe to create frottage impressions of the tombstones of type designers for a forthcoming anthological book; and to Martinique to study and photograph plantation sites that have been converted into rum distilleries and cultural heritage sites.”
—Rich Lopez