Art in Practice: The Intersection of Poetry and Visual Art

With Jeffrey Gibson and Layli Long Soldier

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Art in Practice: The Intersection of Poetry and Visual Art investigates and highlights the influence and collaboration of poets and artists and the intersections between their chosen mediums.

Jeffrey Gibson’s practice merges aspects of Native American visual culture with allusions to contemporary geometric abstraction. The artist references the colors and patterns of nineteenth century painted rawhide containers, commonly called parfleche, which are associated with particular Native communities in the Plateau, Plains, and Great Basin regions. His painting, Migration, is currently on view at Bemis in All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy. By intermingling these designs with a style linked to celebrated, non-Native artists such as Frank Stella and Joseph Albers, Migration contests an American art history that very often overlooks Native American art. The title of this work recalls historically nomadic cultures of Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, as well as the forced dispossession of Native Americans by the federal government across the country during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Formally, Migration also suggests kineticism, a prolific theme in Gibson’s work. As a Native American and a gay man, the artist found acceptance at powwows and in queer club culture. Migration seems to vibrate with the energy and color of these environments, asserting that movement, so often a mechanism of division, can also be a tool of connection that fosters understanding.

Layli Long Soldier’s first volume of poetry, “Whereas”, published in 2017, explores the systemic violence against and cultural erasure of native tribes in the United States through a thoughtful investigation of language. “Whereas” responds to the cautiously phrased and quietly passed 2009 U.S. Congressional Apology to Native Peoples for the history of genocidal policies and actions the United States Federal government has enacted against them. In writing these poems, Long Soldier studied similar apologies from governments across the world to indigenous peoples and considered the nature of authentic apology. Layli Long Soldier’s poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award and a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Art in Practice: The Intersection of Poetry and Visual Art is a three-part series. Join us on August 10 for a presentation by Jenni Quilter, Executive Director of the Expository Writing Program and the Assistant Vice Dean for General Education at NYU, and on August 30 for a conversation with poet Joshua Bennett and Cameron Shaw, Executive Director of the California African American Museum.

Image: Jeffrey Gibson; Migration, 2016; Installation view of All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy, 2021, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Photo: Colin Conces.