In the heart of MASS MoCA, Jeffrey Gibson built a portal.

In this space that is part nightclub, part church, a kaleidoscope of experiences fills five screens suspended from the ceiling. The lives of Indigenous and queer activists, drag queens, DJs and artists are reflected on a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The bass music vibrates in your chest.

Last week, Gibson stood in the gallery as colorful scenes were built around him.

“The amazing thing about this nightclub is that there are no cameras pointed at you and the lights are off,” he said. “There’s an anonymity that happened in my memory of nightclubs that was very, very liberating, but also really brought you together with what looked like your people.”

In Gibson’s videos, someone eats strawberries, dances in a field, puts on makeup, shaves. It is the beautiful and regular daily experience of what it means to be two-spirited.

Gibson explores this concept, present in indigenous cultures, in which a third gender can be both, and neither masculine nor feminine. Just as portals allow passage between dimensions, Gibson views two-spirit identity as a portal in its own right.

“You go in as one self, you experience another self, often within that space, and you come out a different iteration of yourself,” he said.

The artist, who is the first Native American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, is a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half-Cherokee. Gibson uses video, technology and color to explore the intersection of Indigenous and queer identities. In September, he painted a richly colored and symbol-laden mural on the Rose Kennedy Greenway near South Station.

Now it has created quite an immersive experience. Gibson’s multimodal art celebrates what is indigenous, what is queer, what is beautiful in its infinite and colorful differences. Gibson spent the last month leading the installation of this immersive experience called “FULL POWER BECAUSE WE ARE DIFFERENT.”

The exhibition is inspired by an early 1990s documentary about Two-Spirit people and in-depth conversations with Albert McLeod, a Two-Spirit elder from Winnipeg, Canada.

“I think that’s why these art exhibits are so important, because they create a sacred space where everything can exist in balance and we don’t need to explain it,” McLeod said.

McLeod says two-spirit beings have always existed across tribes under different names, with some original words lost to history and colonization.

Featured in Gibson’s work are Native Two-Spirit couple, powwow dancers and activists Sean Snyder, 36, Navajo and Southern Ute, and Adrian Stevens, 29, Northern Ute, Shoshone Bannock and San Carlos Apache.

“It’s definitely not organic,” Stevens said. “It’s spiritual and there’s this spiritual connection depending on whether it’s more masculine or feminine. It means being able to be operational in both spaces.

In the exhibition hall, the feeling is immediately lighter. Sixty large windows are covered with vinyl patterns that let in natural light and transform into a rainbow prism like stained glass on the concrete floor. The walls are scrawled with handwritten messages from Gibson.

“I will continue to change, talk to your ancestors.”
“I am haunted by you, your spirit whispers in my ear.”

MASS MoCA chief curator Denise Markonish says she and Gibson have been talking about this exhibit for years. In all her time at the museum, she has never seen an artist divide this gallery – the size of a football field – to create such disparate experiences.

“And the way it dramatically changed the feel of the space, it fills it with this soft pastel light,” she said. “It’s very calming.”

There are consistent markers throughout Gibson’s work. The meeting of two worlds, club culture and ceremony. Use of traditional materials like beads, ribbons and powwow regalia jingles. The psychedelic color palette with geometric shapes.

“I have so much experience, so many years of working with color. I know how to activate it, Gibson said. “I can calm it down, I can slow it down, I can speed it up, I can make it vibrate. I really feel like it’s really like music. It’s as if I could orchestrate color.”

And he does, in a video at the end of the exhibition where he dons seven magnificent sparkly garments. These garments are also hung throughout the gallery on teepee poles. The video is an ecstatic vision of Gibson in heavy makeup, playing camp, glory and cacophony with a soundscape he composed from dozens of instruments.

“When I think about it visually, it often plays with tropes from art history,” Markonish said. “He’s interested in modernism, minimalism, and sort of hard geometric painting, but what he does at the same time is he looks at this through the lens of indigeneity.”

The video pays homage to a performance art icon named Leigh Bowery, from whom Gibson draws influence and considers her a kindred spirit.

In 1988, Bowery spent a week behind the street-facing windows of the Anthony D’Offay gallery in London. Bowery faced a two-way mirror, unable to see his audience, but fully aware of their presence. He preened and posed while trying on costumes. He interrogated the idea of ​​what it meant to see oneself while being seen.

“What he did was drag, but it was twisted drag, and it was culturally informed drag, and he engaged in camp, but he also really engaged in what I would say is like a political camp,” said. “There was a real, often very punk, point of view about disrupting the status quo of the LGBTQ community at the time. It wasn’t meant to make you feel comfortable.

Gibson’s video has no words, just a euphoric energy emerging from the images. The way Gibson turns and moves is almost meditative, lost in the color around him. Each item of clothing louder than the last, each channeling the show, all while being 52 years old and perfectly comfortable in their own skin.

Exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson “FULL POWER BECAUSE WE ARE DIFFERENT” is on view at MASS MoCA until May 2025.