Current Exhibitions

Jeffrey Gibson’s multimedia practice synthesizes the cultural and artistic traditions of his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage with the visual languages of Modernism and themes from contemporary popular and queer culture. His work is a vibrant call for queer and Indigenous empowerment, envisioning a celebration of strength and joy within these communities. Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, CO) grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, Korea, and England. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and a Master of Arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998. He is a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is of Cherokee heritage. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Bard College and lives and works near Hudson, New York.

At age 14, Jordan D. Schnitzer bought his first work of art from his mother’s Portland, Oregon contemporary art gallery, evolving into a lifelong avocation as collector. He began collecting contemporary prints and multiples in earnest in 1988. Today, the collection exceeds 190,000 works and includes many of today’s most important contemporary artists. It has grown to be one of the country’s largest private print collections. He generously lends work from his collection to qualified institutions. The Foundation has organized over 110 exhibitions and has had art exhibited at over 150 museums. Mr. Schnitzer is also President of Harsch Investment Properties, a privately owned real estate investment company based in Portland, Oregon, owning and managing office, multi-tenant industrial, multi-family and retail properties in six western states. For more information about the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, please visit jordanschnitzer.org.

Bringing the Native South into Focus

Through December 7, the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University's School of Art and Design will display Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibit, Jeffrey Gibson: They Teach Love, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation—a multimedia exhibition that “delve[s] into Gibson’s exploration of radical transformation, both in objects and people” (KSU press release). The museum’s curator Cynthia Nourse Thompson is understandably thrilled to feature the work of an artist who is representing the United States at the Venice Biennale which closes on November 24. But in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department, the Native American and Indigenous Studies program is excited for another reason: Gibson’s exhibit shines a rare spotlight on the contemporary Native South.

The very idea of the Native South is complicated and contested. Many Native Americans who might fit into this category are not technically from the South but grew up in Oklahoma or even further west—like Gibson, who was born in Colorado and now lives in New York. This paradox is just one facet of the United States’ colonial legacy: in 1830, the Indian Removal Act authorized the president to grant lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. As the National Museum of the American Indian describes it, the law “imagined a country free of American Indians.” In the wake of Removal, five major tribal nations in the South—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw—were forced to abandon their homes and relocate to present-day Oklahoma. The most well-known result of Removal, especially in Georgia, was the death of approximately 4,000 Cherokee citizens in what we now call the Trail of Tears. (Today, despite the fact that the United States recognizes 574 tribal nations, there are none in the state of Georgia.) Every southern tribe has similar stories of coercion and land loss.

Of course, some people resisted. Today’s Eastern Band Cherokee in North Carolina are the descendants of the Cherokee people who hid in the mountains rather than leave at gunpoint; the Mississippi Choctaw are likewise descended from those who refused to go. But the Indian Removal Act was only one of the many official American actions—such as the Navajo Long Walk of 1864, the Indian Boarding School movement beginning in 1879, and the Termination and Relocation policies of the 1950s, to name just a few—that forced Indigenous people from their homes and scattered them across the country. Yet most people don’t think of Native Americans as diasporic because, as Gibson puts it, “They were born in the United States and they're still in the United States so where's the Diaspora?”

This is all to say that the history of removal complicates the idea of the Native South. As Gina Caison argues in her book, Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies, “Native people work within, around, and against colonialism to fight for and maintain sovereign land claim in their home spaces. However, Native people do not have to be physically in these locations in order to engage these issues…we might consider that the narrative does not have to be about home to write home within an Indigenous tradition” (5).

In other words, even if they’ve never lived in the southeastern U.S., Indigenous people who are citizens of tribal nations from the Southeast should be considered part of the Native South. When Gibson says he has to “rethink [my] relationship…to my home communities,” we might see that he, too, is “writing home.”

The idea of the “Native South” as not just an archaeological site but its own contemporary designation is relatively new. Gibson explains that he emerged as an artist from “a time that was still so focused and continues to be focused on representation in spaces that were inter-tribal, overt tribal representation was not happening.” The recent cultural turn toward both tribal and regional specificity is therefore especially important in the South, where the story of Indigenous people so often ends with the Trail of Tears.

When I teach Introduction to Native American Studies, students often tell me they signed up for the class because they like learning about history. Those students are surprised to learn that only a quarter of the class focuses on Native American history. For the rest of the semester, we read 21st-century Indigenous literature, explore digital museum exhibits, learn how to apply Indigenous research methods, watch Native-language films, and discuss issues that affect contemporary Indigenous communities, from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests to the Department of the Interior’s three-year investigation into the legacy of American Indian boarding schools. In the wake of removal, the leaders of these movements—the academics, the activists, and the artists—often work far from Georgia, in places like Oklahoma, Chicago, or the Dakotas. But this fall, with Jeffrey Gibson: They Teach Love, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation on display at the ZMA, the Native South will be present and quite literally visible to both my students and the KSU community at large.