The Met's next facade to native Jeffrey Gibson

(by Alessandra Baldini) After having hosted in the atrium of the visitors the work of the trans and native Canadian artist Kent Monkman, the Met in New York has entrusted another artist indigenous, Jeffrey Gibson, the prestigious commission of niches of the facade. Last year Gibson represented The USA at the Venice Biennale with an acclaimed pavilion by critics for the visual force with which he had fused aesthetics indigenous and queer references to American history in a inclusive project of different realities and cultures. The Animal That Therefore I Am, inspired in the title by a famous work by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, will be a cycle of four figurative sculptures that will occupy the niches on the Beaux Art facade on Fifth Avenue reminding the public interconnection coming between September 12th and June 9th 2026 between all living beings and the environment: a theme recurring in the artist's work. The commission is the sixth of the genre for the Met: the first in 2019 saw protagonists four "African caryatids" by the American-Kenyan Wangechi Mutual. Gibson is also a Bipoc artist (the acronym for a acronym that stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color): is official member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (a of federally recognized tribes in the United States) and also descends from Cherokee ancestors. His sculptures, made with unconventional materials and characterized by a synthesis vibrant with abstraction, decorative patterns, symbols and texts, embody an indigenous vision of the world in which human, animal and landscape share common roots and destinies. Born in 1972 in Colorado Springs and grew up between the United States, Germany and Korea, Gibson is known for his interdisciplinary practice: "He is one of the most extraordinary artists of his generation, a figure pioneering in the field of Native and Indigenous art," has declared Max Hollein, the director of the Met. Gibson is the second native artist to be commissioned by the Met in in recent years a high-level contemporary art commission profile. In 2019, during the first Trump presidency, the museum brought into the visitors' hall two large canvases in which Kent Monkman, a Canadian from the Cree tribe, had rewritten the history of the colonization of the new world by appropriating techniques and iconography of the Western art of the colonizers whites under the banner of the idea that "museums cannot remain neutral". The theme is once again current in Trump 2.0 which, strong in the project to reimagine in a modern key nationalist the aesthetics of the artistic programs of the Nation, At the beginning of May it launched the new call for the USA Pavilion in Venice - Gibson in 2024 was the first native protagonist - asking to present "proposals in line with "American exceptionalism and innovation" in order to "advance the interests of the United States."