Jeffrey Gibson takes center stage at The Broad in Los Angeles with his dazzling solo exhibition, Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, on view from May 10th to September 28th, 2025. This marks Jeffrey Gibson’s first major museum show in Southern California and brings his internationally acclaimed work—first seen at the U.S. Pavilion during the 60th Venice Biennale—into bold new focus.
On display at The Broad in Los Angeles are more than thirty works spanning painting, sculpture, murals, textiles, and video. Jeffrey Gibson weaves together Indigenous aesthetics, queer identity, and protest language into a vivid world of color and form. As a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson constructs a language of resistance rooted in survival, beauty, and cultural pride.
A centerpiece of the exhibition at The Broad in Los Angeles is THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT… (2024), which reclaims a 1902 government letter urging Native children to assimilate. Jeffrey Gibson transforms it with text, beading, and saturated color into a radiant call for dignity. In the video work She Never Dances Alone, dancer Sarah Ortegon HighWalking performs a jingle dance across nine screens—her movement becoming a tribute to Indigenous women’s strength.
Also commissioned for The Broad in Los Angeles is a pair of beaded moccasins fitted onto a historical bronze statue, offering a subtle but potent reimagining of monumentality. Sculptures such as WE WANT TO BE FREE (2024) stand as totems of autonomy, while the mural BIRDS FLYING HIGH YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL (2024) draws on Nina Simone’s voice to evoke both grief and liberation.
Throughout the exhibition, Jeffrey Gibson mines familiar texts—from civil rights speeches to pop lyrics—to ask how identity can be simultaneously fractured and whole. His work invites reflection and insists on visibility for those pushed to the margins. As The Broad in Los Angeles director Joanne Heyler notes, the show is both “an act of truth-telling and a vivid expression of hope.”
In our interview, Jeffrey Gibson opens up about cultural complexity, Indigenous futurism, and why making art now demands clarity, joy, and resistance.
Photography by JOSHUA WHITE
Photography by JOSHUA WHITE
Photography by JOSHUA WHITE
Photography by JOSHUA WHITE
We Want to Be Free
Courtesy of JEFFREY GIBSON STUDIO
THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT FAR TOO FREQUENTLY GOES BACK TO THE RESERVATION AND FALLS INTO THE OLD CUSTOM OF LETTING HIS HAIR GROW LONG, 2024
Courtesy of JEFFREY GIBSON STUDIO, photography by MAX YAWNEY