At MASS MoCA, Jeffrey Gibson Stages a Club and a Church 

i-D
2024

Saturday, three days before the election. Driving to the Berkshires, I watch fall crack wide open and fill the windows. Vistas appear and dissolve in whirls of tangelo and brown. Streams bubble beside us, then melt into grass. Churches become double garages, then trees, flashing their leaves of crimson or startling chartreuse. I briefly imagine a new life for myself, in which there is a lawn to tend to and a freestanding mailbox and a garage for the car I am suddenly licensed to drive. Back out the window, near the entrance to North Adams, a sign reads “NICE THINGS HAPPEN IN NORTH ADAMS.” And just ahead of that, two guys stand roadside, waving missives on flags: “GOD. GUNS. TRUMP.”

The valley town of North Adams is home to MASS MoCA, one of America’s largest centers for visual arts and performance. Its exhibition spaces sprawl across a network of 19th-century mill buildings. For most of its history, the complex was a hub of industrial production. Since 1999, it’s been full of art.

We pull up in the mid afternoon. Outside, the sky is a void, blank and beckoning. Inside, visitors dart around the cafe and gift shop, which spill into the foyer. I run my hand along a rack of MASS MoCA-branded t-shirts, mentally cataloging their softness (pretty soft). Soon, press are led to a room — starring a mountain of sandwiches — for a briefing on the evening ahead. We are here for the opening of Jeffrey Gibson’s blockbuster installation POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT, running through May 2026, which spans multiple rooms in Building 5 of the museum, and is the size of a football field. (I briefly imagine I am someone who can visualize the size of a football field.) To celebrate: an afternoon-to-evening of talks and musical performances on site. We hear that the closing act, Anohni — who will present an hour-long concert alongside the French pianist Gael Rakotondrabe — is in the complex. We do not hear where. 

Gibson, who is of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, creates installations, paintings, performance, and sculpture platforming queer and Indigenous communities. His chromatic, textured design language draws from Indigenous craft and metalwork traditions, riffs on Op Art geometrics, and mines text and found objects to make references to queer culture, club culture, pop culture, politics, fashion, and philosophy. The artist has created an ongoing series of Everlast punching bags, bedecked with densely patterned beadwork and nylon fringing that invokes lustrous satin robes worn by boxers, as well as powwow dance regalia. Defiant text, like “ALL I EVER WANTED ALL I EVER NEEDED” or slogans like “WHITE POWER” (rendered in transparent white beading, on an all-white punching bag) complicate the bags as emblems of violence, vulnerability, and release.

Gibson is also drawn to vast, semi-public spaces and events that nurture togetherness and transcendence. Powwows, nightclubs, raves. His MASS MoCA installation builds on momentum from the latest Venice Biennale, where he was the first ever Indigenous artist to exhibit solo at the U.S. Pavilion, and raised funds for other Indigenous collaborators to join him. “Jeffrey astutely knew that Venice had to do a certain thing,” says MASS MoCA’s chief curator Denise Markonish warmly, as we chat in one of the exhibition’s few quiet spaces — a resource room in an upstairs mezzanine. “Here, there wasn’t the same kind of weight. I think you can feel freedom in this show. He and I talked early on about that idea. What we can offer, in this space particularly, is allowing artists to let their hair down.”

The show splices a cavernous gallery into sacred zones of club and church: one dark, the other airy, filled with North Adams’ mountain light. On opening night, guests mill between the two — via a tall and twisting two-by-four tunnel Gibson describes as “a portal” — clutching drinks and popcorn and tiny burgers. I descend stairs to enter the first frenzied club zone: black-walled, with flashing, prismatic screens stationed overhead. A thumping dance soundtrack by Patrick Coll swells and echoes, punctuated by voices of Indigenous two-spirit individuals. On the screens, videos loop. On the screens, videos loop. One is the 1991 documentary Two Spirit People, profiling Bay Area creatives unpacking the two-spirit term, as well as their own identities. Here, it’s part of a larger work by Gibson, Your Spirit Whispers in My Ear (2024), all blinkered neons and crowdsourced material from two-spirit DJs, drag performers, activists, and academics, mostly cast by Gibson via social media.

Also suspended are several oversized garments — square-bodied, with cascading sleeves — splayed like party effigies across horizontal tipi poles. The clothing pieces reference regalia worn in faith-based ceremonies such as Ghost Dance, a pacifist movement originating with the Northern Paiute. They’re festooned with resin gummy bears, souvenir keyrings spelling “QUEER,” appliqué flowers and disc-sized sequins. One patchwork neon garment is caged by a black leather harness, which is studded with plush metallic and tie-dye hearts that resemble soft little pillows. The garb calls to mind day-glo, fetishwear and a body in motion, but also suggests itself — or the body, or the metaphoric club we’re inside of — as a place of rest and reawakening.

Below the garments, hanging here and in the bright adjoining room, are custom stages. The square glass boxes have kaleidoscopic surfaces that appear lit from within, where dazzling gradients, grids, and shapes overlap to hypnotic effect. Over the next 18 months, these and other sites throughout the complex will feature over 10 performers — from violinist Laura Ortman to Navajo drag queen Lady Shug—all developing unique stagings in dialogue with Gibson’s works, and activating them through sound and gesture. Other rotating elements of the exhibit are housed in a resource room, curated by Gibson and Antonia Oliver. Right now, it abounds with two-spirit ephemera—posters, photographs, itineraries from historic gatherings—much of it from archives at the University of Winnipeg. (That archive was amassed and donated by Albert Mcleod, who is known as “the grandmother of Manitoba’s Two-Spirit movement,” and who also conducts a Q&A with Gibson this weekend.)

I navigate through the tunnel and the church, where a crowd is gathering. The thumping dance track is an echo. I queue for a wine then twist between strangers’ conversations. I pass a man with a septum ring and floppy wizard hat, the back of a 30-something’s S.C.U.M Manifesto tee, an older woman with coiffed hair in a blue shirt, imploring others to VOTE, and Gibson’s young son, in a black sequin suit and mohawk, posing for photos on a rainbow stage.

I catch most of Takiaya Reed’s three-song set, which she performs atop one of the stages, standing beneath the sole black garment in the show. (“[To Jeffrey] I was like, hey, I love your work. Do you mind making something that’s black?” she tells me after.) Reed, who is Black and Cherokee, is known for founding doom outfit Divide and Dissolve. She plays the guitar and clarinet — bouncing between a visceral drone and looping, mellifluous woodwind melody — and faces the drummer for most of the show. “That’s absolutely intentional,” she says. “I play to my heartbeat. We need to connect to what’s going on internally. There’s lots of ways to connect, and one way is looking at each other. It’s heart first and forward.” After her set, Reed turns hopefully to the crowd: “There’s so many Indigenous people here,” she begins. “…I’m thinking about Palestine, and how it needs to be free in order for people to live.”

I make my way to the next room, a mezzanine gallery with two long benches, which house a 22-minute, two-channel video projection. It is my favorite work in the show. Against a black backdrop, a shamanic Gibson thrashes, reclines, twirls and jolts in his own oversized garments, at one point collapsing in a heap of plush metallic spikes. The footage rewinds, blinkers with starlight, repeats and reverses. The soundtrack is percussive, dissonant, almost cosmic. Gibson’s movements are improvised, but carry authority. His stare penetrates. Sometimes his bald scalp is painted green, affixed with flowers; other times it’s fuschia, framed by a long black wig. The work is named after a line Gibson’s daughter once uttered spontaneously — Sometimes your body changes and you don’t remember your dreams — and is inspired by a 1998 performance of a Leigh Bowery piece from a decade before. In it, Bowery posed and preened, trying on different costumes, before a one-way mirror installed in the gallery window. Unable to see his audience — like Gibson — Bowery’s voyeuristic staging heightened the tension between visibility and privacy. The garb calls to mind day-glo, fetishwear and a body in motion, but also suggests itself — or the body, or the metaphoric club we’re inside of — as a place of rest and reawakening.

“I felt like it wouldn’t make sense for me to direct someone else in a homage to Leigh Bowery,” Gibson later tells me. “I have such a bodily resemblance to Leigh. We’re not that different in terms of our height and size. He passed away in ’94 I believe … And I learned about him in ’96. I felt like I’d just missed a kindred spirit.”

It’s getting late, and I’m ushered toward a speedy dinner at Casita, the Mexican restaurant onsite. I order the gnocchi with street corn, which I get boxed up to-go, and which tragically must accompany me to the bathroom before the evening’s final act. Anohni is about to start, and I’m rushing with the last stragglers to the auditorium where she’ll serenade us, shake us, wring us out, and restore us — armed with a haunting vibrato the writer next to me compares to “a spirit.”

She is bathed in light up there: blue and then red. Anohni wears white gloves and a ceremonial gown produced by Gibson’s studio, which will be cleaned and gifted to her post-show. The gown is mostly white, with wide sleeves — think elaborate choir robes — and embroidered with the words all the things that led to this moment. It’s the second time I’ve seen Gibson’s garments worn tonight. Her movements are slow, deliberate.

Anohni sings “4 Degrees” and “Drone Bomb Me” and “I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy”. She sings “Hopelessness” and “Motherless Child” and “It Must Change”. To Gibson, she dedicates a haunted, balladic rendition of Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love”. She sings for an hour, just her and the piano, and no one makes a sound, or holds up their iPhones to film for too long. (The exception, someone three rows ahead of me, zooms in-and-out of the stage at a rapid, feverish pace, as though trying to capture a hummingbird mid-flight.) While she’s up there, a screen projects grainy video: pale flowers coming in and out of focus; footage from the Blacklips performance cult; the legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson telling her life; and a long clip from The Salt Mines, a 1990 documentary which follows three Latinx trans women who’ve made a home in NYC’s abandoned Department of Sanitation trucks. 

Like Gibson’s show, Anohni’s performance is intertextual. Splicing archival footage and imagery throughout reveals her sustained interest in retelling and paying homage to queer histories, in citing more than proof of existence, but of individuals’ flourishing and their fullness, in spite of outside brutality. (Whenever a video plays, Anohni stands to the screen’s side, out of view, fading into the dark.)

When the lights flicker on, no one talks much at all. A few people are crying what I regard as happy tears. Two older women link arms. A cluster of friends breathlessly analyze the set list. For a while, I remain in a kind of daze, suspended in the psychic space between “church” and “club,” in Gibson’s portal-artworks, which are fertile and alive with possibility. And then we all file out, full of love, past the gift shop, and slip into the night.

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