Before the Biennale opened in April, Art in America visited the artist in his studio, a spacious workshop teeming at the time with some 20 studio assistants in a former schoolhouse near Hudson, New York. While he primed a canvas and examined other works in various stages of preparation, Gibson talked about the allure of painting, his interest in the history and intricacy of beadwork, and advice he offers to aspiring artists looking to make their mark. Watch Gibson in his studio in the video above, and read more about him in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Andy Battaglia

A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson had garnered attention with a couple small solo shows in New York and a pair of notable group exhibitions that followed. But his status was a matter of perspective. “I felt very emerging at that point,” Gibson recalled. “But because the Native art world and the larger art world were so separate at the time, I think most of my peers who were non-Native were unaware. It was like I was at different stages in different contexts.”

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Video: Venice Biennale Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Painting and Paying Tribute to Indigenous Cultural Legacies

He was reminiscing from a very different vantage this past winter, just six weeks out from unveiling his United States Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the first time an Indigenous artist has represented America with a solo show at the illustrious affair. He was not holed up in a New York City studio but splayed out in an enormous converted schoolhouse in Hudson, an Upstate outpost that has been his home since 2012. His art for the Venice show had already shipped, but his team of some 20 studio assistants was occupied with works in various stages of creation: radiant paintings, dynamic sculptures, glamorous costumes, and dazzling ornamentation based in beads.

However far removed from his early years, it had not been all that long since a younger Gibson wandered around the Biennale wondering what might lie ahead of him. “As a struggling young artist in New York City, you don’t know how to know if anyone even cares. I had been to the Biennale when I was in grad school, but this was my first time there with any access to anything, and it was really important to feel included,” he recalled of that 2007 trip.

Kathleen Ash-Milby, a Navajo curator who was also then on the rise, had invited Gibson to Venice to see an event she organized via the NMAI for Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho), an artist 17 years Gibson’s senior. “I remember Edgar naming the Indigenous people who had died while traveling in Europe on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show,” Gibson said of the cowboys-and-Indians spectacle that toured overseas around the turn of the 20th century. “That was very significant for me.”

He also remembered meeting other Indigenous artists who would become allies and, especially, forging an important bond with Ash-Milby, who would play an important role in his being awarded the US Pavilion close to two decades later. Ash-Milby said she recalled some wild speculative dreaming about such a fate, “which at the time seemed like an insane idea.”

Gibson, for his part, remembered appreciating the provocation inherent in Edgar Heap of Birds’s presentation, and feeling curious about what might happen if even more change ever came: “I think we both kind of felt like, Is this the beginning of something—something that hasn’t happened?”

GIBSON WAS BORN IN 1972 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but grew up as a citizen of the world. With extended family in Mississippi and Oklahoma, he moved around while his father worked different jobs as a civil engineer for the US Department of Defense. He lived in Germany before elementary school and then spent time in New Jersey before relocating in his early teens to South Korea in 1985.

“Korea was impactful for me, partially because I was paying attention more independently to popular culture as it was being funneled abroad,” Gibson said. “This is when MTV was big, and there was street culture and an art scene in New York City that was being shown through music and fashion. There was one hour of MTV at midnight, and we would all talk about it, because we were jonesing.”

Formative discoveries at the time included Culture Club and Wham!, two pop acts that signaled an interest in music and identification with queer culture that figure in his art decades later. Other discoveries helped develop a capacity for cultural versatility, then and now. “When I was a kid, I romantically identified as a nomad,” Gibson said. “Living abroad and being American was an empowered and privileged place to be. But when I would come back to the US, I would be reminded that I was a person of color, and that we didn’t have as much money as it felt like we had when we were abroad. What I would bring back with me was a sense that I had traveled and seen other things. It made me feel like I knew there was a huge world. Being aware of other cultures certainly helped inform my general aesthetic and understanding of difference.”

While living overseas, Gibson returned to the US regularly, around once or twice a year, to visit relatives—and commune with histories and heritages that figured in his Indigenous identity. “My experience is a 20th-century Native American experience, and the idea that there’s any line between what is or isn’t a ‘Native American experience’ is blurry,” he said. “It’s problematic when we think about Native American heritages, especially in the 20th century, because they’re all so unique.”

Poverty and racism were issues for both the Choctaw and Cherokee sides of his family, but their circumstances differed significantly—and developed differently over time. In Mississippi, the longtime chief of the Choctaw tribe during Gibson’s childhood devised an economic plan that brought factory work and financial stability to the area. “By the ’90s, the tribe was one of the largest employers in the state, and it had a surplus of employment beyond our tribal population,” Gibson said. “So that’s the story of the Choctaw people, in addition to what we could talk about in terms of tribal dances, ribbon shirts, basket weaving, and the symbolism that exists there.”

In Oklahoma, where the Cherokee part of his family resided, Christianity played a role in Native American culture that clashed in certain ways with traditions that had been handed down over centuries. “Within both sides of my family—in Oklahoma and Mississippi—there were people who identified as Christian and others who continued traditional spiritual practices. I had uncles who continued doing traditional dancing and a grandmother and grandfather who established Southern Baptist churches.”

During visits to America, Gibson’s relationship with the various facets of his family complicated any easy answer to the question of how closely he identified as Indigenous. “It’s always been difficult for me to distinguish how much I am a part of a community,” he said. “I was always embraced, and because I would leave and go to Korea didn’t make me any less Choctaw. Wherever that line is, comes more from an external perspective. We never stopped being Choctaw or Cherokee. If anything, I think the subject is more how we quantify how those communities were shifting, decade by decade, throughout the entire 20th century. And that’s just for those two tribes—there are other tribes who have different narratives.”

In any case, Gibson said his relationship with Indigeneity owes to what he grew up with and what he has honed on his own over time. “I have never lived among a Native community where everyone around me was Native all the time, seven days a week,” he said. “But I also refuse to let anyone make me feel that my leaving the reservation makes me less Choctaw. It’s just not that simple.”

GIBSON WAS TRAINED AS A PAINTER, but his canvases—vibrant and geometric, with mesmerizingly colored patterns and bits of text he borrows from sources including pop songs, poems, and historical records—have increasingly become just one component of his shows. His work for the US Pavilion in Venice includes 11 paintings, nine sculptures, eight flags, two murals, and one video installation. A key feature of much of his art, including the paintings, is beadwork that glistens and gleams by way of handicraft as fine as that in haute couture.

Gibson’s facility with materials traces back to his university years in Chicago, where he moved in 1992 to study at the Art Institute. The next year, he took a side job at the Field Museum of Natural History as a research assistant working with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which since 1990 has provided for the protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. His work related to the legislation, which has grown in significance in recent years, involved processing items in the museum’s collection and showing them to tribal delegations that came through.

“Sometimes we had protocols to follow, but we didn’t always even know exactly what an object was, which brought up a lot of questions,” Gibson said. “Even though something may have had a record that said it was voluntarily sold, we would look back and see that it was sold under duress, or that the person who sold it was not necessarily in a position to do so. There were many things that were ‘collected’—or stolen—and there were things that should not be shared about what an object was or what it was used for.”

One such object was a prayer bundle, a parcel filled with spiritually significant contents that had been secreted away and wrapped in cloth or other material. “The only person who knows how to use what’s inside a prayer bundle is someone who’s been raised within ceremony to understand what it is and what to do with it,” Gibson said. “Many prayer bundles had been disassembled, and this was horrific to people who think they are never meant to be seen.” Another example was a stick that had seemed to some museum staffers to be part of a game but turned out to be imbued with other qualities. “Somebody came in and said, ‘No, you must cover that up immediately!’ It literally went from being one thing to another.”

Gibson’s work at the museum taught him about what he did and did not know, and he was energized by both. “NAGPRA is an amazing and hard-won law,” he said, “but what it really taught me was the problems of intercultural translation, language, perception, even entire worldviews. We could look at any object and there are going to be differences in how we view it. That became really interesting to me.”

It also opened his eyes to materials other than paint, and roles for art that ventured beyond simple states of objecthood. He learned to sew in Chicago from a fellow Native American friend who vowed to make her own clothes, and he made a doll that wound up scrambling his value system. “It was a ragdoll figure of a blonde woman wearing a buckskin dress. The fabric I used for her body was a Southwest print,” he said, adding that inspiration had been provided by white-presenting women he’d seen at powwows wearing clothes that had clearly been bought for the occasion.

A professor at the Art Institute liked the doll and “wanted to introduce me to people who could write about it or show it, but I just shut down so quickly,” Gibson said. “For me, at the time, it felt like much less of a responsibility to make an abstract painting about paint and put it out into the world. To make something that was actually a statement with a kind of critical perspective—I wasn’t ready for that.”

He was acquainting himself with different ways to work within and around tradition, however, and ways to question what exactly constitutes tradition in Indigenous cultures that are ever-changing. “I’ve always worked intuitively with different materials, based on my experience of working with historic collections and realizing all the innovations that stepped away from what I had been taught about ‘traditional’ materials,” he said. “Even things we think of as traditional, like beads, replaced other traditions. We are innovators—this is what we do. We look around and try to think about how we can make materials into something that serves our culture or serves our community. I started to see that way of thinking as a tradition in and of itself.”

“JEFFREY SHOWS THAT ONE of the most important things about contemporary Indigenous culture is that it has a specific cultural and material inheritance, but its cultural inheritance is expressed through its materials,” said Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), a curator who first showed Gibson’s work in a show about Indigenous futurism in 2011 and, two years later, in “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada that has been credited with reshaping studies of contemporary Indigenous art. For the latter show, Gibson made two paintings on elk hide that had been treated via a process that has been largely lost to history: brain tanning.

“A lot of commercial hide production is just that—very commercialized,” Gibson said. “The animals aren’t treated with a great life. They’re not killed in a humane way. In the belief system, there are histories that are inherent to hides, and I knew I wanted a hide with a different narrative.”

After some searching, he found a hunter in Montana who still practices the craft, which involves massaging the fatty matter of an animal’s brain into a hide to soften and preserve it. The hunter had killed an elk of the kind that Gibson wanted, but winter set in before he was able to tan it, so he buried the skin in the ground to freeze for the season with a plan to exhume it in the spring. As time ticked on, though, Gibson started to get anxious. “I had a deadline coming up and I was like, ‘I really need this hide!’ I felt like such a consumer,” he remembered. “Consumer thinking trains us that we can have things when we want them. But it was all part of the narrative, and I had to give in to it.”

When he finally received the brain-tanned hides, he painted them with boldly colored diagonals that suggest a sort of abstract topography and titled them This Place I Know and Someone Great Is Gone (both 2013). “That taught me a lot about the material roots of Jeffrey’s practice and the honesty to materials that he brings forward,” Hopkins said. “Everything has a story to tell.” For his part, Gibson remembered discovering a sort of poetry in the process. “The idea behind brain tanning,” he said, “is to take the memory of the animal and put it back into the skin.”

For a 2019 residency at the New Museum in New York, Gibson learned a battery of new skills, and made his education part of the premise of an exhibition that evolved as his knowledge grew. “He talked about this thing that happens when he’s asked to do a project that is supposed to represent Indigeneity, even though it’s super-differentiated, as a generalist idea,” said Johanna Burton, who curated “The Anthropophagic Effect” as part of the New Museum’s department of education and public engagement (she is now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). “He was excited about the fact that he had to learn some of the skills he wanted to use the same way that anybody else would.”

With the idea of an Indigenous atelier in mind, Gibson brought artist Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe) from Michigan to New York to teach him and his studio staff crafts that had been practiced by Indigenous people long before the arrival of European settlers. One such craft, birchbark biting (what the Northwestern Ontario Ojibwe call mazinashkwemaganjigan), involves making patterns in tree coverings by biting into them and exposing layers and fissures within. “It’s all in the way you fold the bark and then bite it, and birchbark pieces would become patterns for embroidery and, eventually, beadwork,” Gibson said. “That came at a time when I was thinking about how Native people think about abstraction differently. It’s in many ways abstract, but it’s also so specific to the person who did the biting.”

Other newly acquired skills included porcupine quillwork and river cane basket weaving, which were useful in creating garments that voguing dancers wore in performances that activated the artworks. Gibson also made helmets with the basket weaving process, transforming it to his own ends. “It’s not Choctaw tradition to make helmets, but it is Choctaw tradition to make river cane baskets,” he said. “My goal was never to recreate what was made previously. I didn’t want to learn how to make baskets—I wanted to learn the technology of making a basket, so that I could then make sculpture.”

GIBSON’S RESOURCEFUL, RESILIENT WORK for the US Pavilion in Venice draws on his many modes of art-making that commune with traditions while also revising and redefining them in his own terms. Color is in high supply, as are allusions to struggle and perseverance. “He has been addressing the same kind of problems in different ways while looking at, respecting, and honoring the Native experience,” said Ash-Milby, the curator who has worked with Gibson from the start of his career. “Part of that is acknowledging that there have been challenges and pain. That’s part of what we carry and who we are today.”

When the idea arose to submit a proposal for the Venice Biennale, Gibson turned to a trio of supporters for help: Ash-Milby, currently the curator of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Louis Grachos, who presented a wide-ranging survey titled “The Body Electric” at SITE Sante Fe in 2022; and Abigail Winograd, an independent curator who worked with Gibson on a 2021 exhibition related to the MacArthur Fellowship Program (Gibson won a prestigious “genius grant” in 2019).

For the show with Winograd, titled “Sweet Bitter Love,” Gibson made paintings in response to stereotypical late 19th- and early 20th-century portraits of Indigenous people in the collection of Chicago’s Newberry Library, and exhibited accession cards from the Field Museum, where he had worked while a student. In his paintings, Gibson aimed to open up the historical portraits by riffing and remixing them in a manner that made them personal to him and his place in time. Part of that included attaching vintage objects—beaded barrettes, found pins, decorated belts—that he collects in part as a tribute to unnamed artists who contribute to culture in a multitude of ways.

“We know the names of the sitters in paintings, but with vintage objects, oftentimes we don’t know the names of the people who made them,” Gibson said. “Those objects are also not valued, and we don’t know how they were acquired. The collective Native American experience in the US is shaped by the unnamed and the unknown, by all of these gaps and exclusions and erasures. That’s what I wanted those pieces to speak to.”

Such vintage finds figure in many of his Venice works. A sculptural bust titled Be Some Body (2024) is affixed with a button that bears the message IF WE SETTLE FOR WHAT THEY’RE GIVING US, WE DESERVE WHAT WE GET. A painting in which diamond-shaped patterns seem to recede and pulse out into open space, WE WILL BE KNOWN FOREVER BY THE TRACKS WE LEAVE (2024) flaunts a belt buckle and bolo tie, as well as a bag embellished with lane-stitch beadwork.

Some of the work winds back to familiar forms. The hanging sculpture WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (2024)—elaborately beaded and adorned with fringe that spills onto the floor in the black, white, yellow, and red colors of the medicine wheel—revisits a series of punching bag pieces that Gibson started working on in 2010, when he found a form that evoked the anger he felt around matters of race, class, and bodily disconnection. An interactive sculpture that shares its title with that of Gibson’s pavilion as a whole—the space in which to place me (2024)—echoes a 2022 project for which he invited Indigenous people to populate empty monument pedestals in front of the Portland Art Museum.

Activation is a key component of Gibson’s practice, in which performance and pedagogy play pivotal roles. In June the Pavilion will host the Venice Indigenous Arts School, a series of public programs focused on key terminology and concepts in Indigenous arts, arranged by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. “An example would be various terms for weather that take into consideration how weather affects the whole process of making art and putting it out there,” said Mario A. Caro, director of the Institute’s studio arts MFA program, who organized the event. “Weather informs the ways in which traditional materials would be gathered and processed. And by ‘weather,’ we don’t just mean ecology or environmental issues—weather really talks about a relation between the people and the land.” Another part of the program, in October, will explore connections between Indigenous cultures in North America and around the world, in partnership with Bard College, where Gibson teaches.

With a global audience set to engage his work at the Venice Biennale, Gibson said he had charged himself with continuing to position his own past, present, and future in relation to a prism of Indigenous histories and ideas. The task has been daunting, he said. But it is also catalyzing in ways he hopes will carry over. “I don’t identify as a frontline activist,” Gibson said. “But we are all politicized for how we are seen. We are also advocating for our political selves, and those political selves are rooted in our ancestry and our heritages.”

When looking over images of his Venice works in his schoolhouse studio a few months back, Gibson paused at a large bird sculpture with rainbow-colored plumage rendered in a riotous mix of materials including glass beads, rose quartz, and metallic sequins. Its title is if there is no struggle there is no progress (2024), a quotation from a speech by Frederick Douglass, and it is one of two such birds in the Pavilion.

“They’re based in the Tuscarora tradition of beaded whimsies,” Gibson said. “The bird was one of the primary forms they used to try to appeal to Victorian tastes, but they were seen as neither Native enough nor not-Native enough. I encountered them at the Field Museum and felt very much akin to them because they’re somewhere in between all these different kinds of cultural traditions. That’s how the birds work.”  

This article appears under the title “Hide and Seek” in the Summer 2024 “Icons” issue, pp. 56–63.

As told to A.i.A. I was listening to music hunting for words to use in my work and came across this disco song, “Born to Be Alive,” by Patrick Hernandez from 1978. As a mix of different kinds of musics—and a place for LGBTQIA2S+ histories—disco was so divisive at the time. People were burning disco records with the same kind of agenda behind books being banned now. The lyrics to this song are explicitly about not only demanding to be able to be alive but also total self-affirmation that says, “I am supposed to exist.” This was a time when Latino, Black, and white people, primarily, were coming together to make a new sound and a new environment that allowed LGBTQIA2S+ communities to come together. This one-hit wonder that some people might dismiss was actually politically provocative in a way that things from a queer aesthetic—like kitsch or camp—are sometimes criticized or invalidated for having too much color.

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Beaded faces in my work started a while ago. I was thinking about when we look at prehistoric drawings, like petroglyphs, and how, when we see faces, we try to understand what they were drawing. Some people think they are gods, or spirits. Some think they are aliens. We don’t always entirely know what the images are. I was thinking about that and wondered, What does this offer me?

When I started making garments of my own, I was looking at ceremonial garments, and oftentimes there would be paintings of faces or different kinds of iconography on them. I started wondering, How do I create my own personal iconography, or my own personal symbolism? That’s when I realized it would be my own work. Us not knowing specifically what these faces were gave me license to invent a face that I didn’t really know.

By the time I came to Born to Be Alive, I got over thinking I had to work with any one particular kind of bead. The blue bead in the pupils of the eyes is a Czech bead. Those are freshwater pearls around the outside of the eyes. The teeth are all amethyst, and the nose is an arrowhead. And then the frame is made with crow beads from India. Everything else is glass beads: seed beads and pony beads. They all carry their own kind of indulgences.

The language that Native people have worked with has always been anything that is available to us. I can access that now from anywhere. 

Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee known for vibrantly colored abstract works that celebrate queer and Native identities, will be the sixth artist to transform the Met’s facade with new sculptures. His works—four figurative sculptures that he refers to as ancestral spirit figures—will take over the niches from South Korean sculptor Lee Bul; they will be on view from September 2025 through May 2026.

The prestigious Met commission follows another momentous career milestone for Gibson: he was chosen this past July to represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale, becoming the first Indigenous artist in the 90-year history of the American Pavilion to do it alone.

Meanwhile, Jennie C. Jones will be the last artist commissioned to create sculptures for the museum’s rooftop garden before the outdoor space closes for renovations related to the construction of the Tang Wing, a $500 million, five-story-high gallery expansion. Jones, who was born in Cincinnati and works in Hudson, New York, uses sculpture, painting, and sound to probe the legacies of modernism and Black avant-garde music. In her minimalist sound installations, hearing supplements seeing.

For the Met rooftop, she will create her first multi-work outdoor installation; it will be on view from April 15, 2025, through October 19, 2025. She succeeds Kosovo-born artist Petrit Halilaj.

Max Hollein, director of the Met, said in a statement, “Though stylistically different, both Jones and Gibson see the potential for beauty and form to carry the potency of individual and cultural histories. We’re honored to have them join this important commission series and look forward to unveiling their works in 2025.”

Below, ARTnews has compiled five shows in Chelsea that you can’t miss during Armory Week.

In the lawsuit, filed in early May in United States District Court for the Northern District of New York, Gibson claims that the gallery owes him $638,919.31 for works it has sold. Kavi Gupta, in a filing last week, denied the allegations, disputing the terms of the agreement outlined by the artist in his lawsuit and saying that the gallery had invested a significant amount in helping produce Gibson’s artworks.

Gibson, who is based in Hudson, New York, is well-known for paintings and sculptures that apply styles derived from Western modernism and Native American craft. Many of these works feature texts borrowed from pop songs. He is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is also of Cherokee descent. His US Pavilion will make him the first Indigenous artist ever to represent the country solo at the Venice Biennale.

Kavi Gupta and Gibson began conversations about working together in 2017, the year that the dealer featured his work in an Art Basel Miami Beach booth. According to Gibson’s lawsuit, in 2018, they came to an agreement for future sales in which the artist would keep 50 percent of the sales made by Kavi Gupta of his artwork.

But, Gibson’s lawsuit claims, “at some point the Gallery fell behind and failed to timely remit Gibson’s full share of sales proceeds.”

“Because the Gallery has stalled and failed to even negotiate in earnest a mutually acceptable payment plan,” the suit continues, “Gibson is now forced to commence this action to seek the full amount of sales proceeds which belong to him (together with additional compensation permitted by law).”

Gupta said in his affidavit that Gibson began claiming he was owed money in 2022, roughly two years after the gallery allegedly began advancing the artist funds in an effort to stem financial strain resulting from the pandemic. Gupta claimed that his gallery had paid vendor costs and production expenses for Gibson with the expectation that the gallery would get them back when works sold. This allegedly included the $57,000 spent by the gallery on Gibson’s current Aspen Art Museum exhibition, which opened last November.

The artist and the gallery appear to disagree on which funds would be reimbursed, however. According to Gibson, he only agreed to repay framing costs to the gallery for consigned works that came in unframed. According to Gupta, the gallery expected to receive more than just those costs.

In his affidavit, Gupta said that his gallery had spent $764,600 on supporting Gibson and that “Gibson has benefited substantially from the Gallery’s efforts.”

A legal representative for Gibson did not respond to a request for comment. Through his lawyer, Gupta declined to comment.

The lawsuit was filed ahead of various presentations of Gibson’s work in museums across the country. His work is in “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969” at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art in Upstate New York, “Language in Times of Miscommunication” at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona, and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.

Gibson also edited a book about contemporary Indigenous art that releases this month, and will show his work later this year in a major survey of weaving and abstraction opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The lawsuit preceded the announcement of his Venice Biennale pavilion in July.

Two other artists have left Kavi Gupta in recent months: Deborah Kass and Suchitra Mattai. Contacted by ARTnews, they did not specify the reasons for their departures.

Update, 8/7/23, 6:03 p.m.: Mention that Suchitra Mattai also left Kavi Gupta has been added to this article.

Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and who is also of Cherokee descent, is known for vibrantly colored paintings, sculptures, and more that often incorporate text, some of it appropriated from pop music. At times, the work edges into abstraction, in an attempt to marry styles borrowed from Western modernism and Native American craft.

Beadwork has figured prominently in his work, as have spray-painting and other techniques. Among his most famous works are sculptural pieces formed from punching bags that he beads in patterns recalling the clothes worn by powwow dancers.

Two curators will work with Gibson on the pavilion: independent curator Abigail Winograd and Kathleen Ash-Milby, a Portland Art Museum curator of Native American art who is a member of the Navajo nation, making her the first Indigenous curator to work on a US Pavilion. They commissioned the pavilion with SITE Santa Fe director Louis Grachos.

“Throughout his career, Jeffrey has challenged us to look at the world differently through his innovative and vibrant work,” Ash-Milby said in a statement. “His inclusive and collaborative approach is a powerful commentary on the influence and persistence of Native American cultures within the United States and globally, making him the ideal representative for the United States at this moment.” 

The Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe are the two commissioning institutions. That in itself is a rarity—most US Pavilions have been commissioned by East Coast museums in the Northeast.

This is the second US Pavilion in a row to mark a first. The 2022 one was done by sculptor Simone Leigh, who was the first Black woman ever to stage the pavilion solo. Portions of that pavilion currently figure in an acclaimed survey now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, its commissioning institution.

The US Pavilion, which has been devoted to solo presentations since 1986, has previously featured at least one Indigenous artist: the Hopi painter Fred Kabotie, who showed in a group presentation in 1932.

Gibson’s pavilion comes at a high moment in his career. Having shown previously in editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art, the Whitney Biennial, and Desert X held in the past decade, his work is now on view at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art in Upstate New York, where it figures in a show called “Indian Theater,” about performative practices and Indigenous aesthetics. Gibson is also due to a release a book next month that he edited called An Indigenous Present, which is being billed as a survey of contemporary Indigenous art.

A host of other pavilions have already been announced for the Venice Biennale, where John Akomfrah will represent Great Britain, Julien Creuzet will represent France, and Archie Moore will represent Australia, becoming the second-ever Australian artist to do so.

Meanwhile, Museu de Arte de São Paulo artistic director Adriano Pedrosa will curate the main show, which is not related to the national pavilions. His exhibition will take the title “Foreigners Everywhere” and will focus on diasporas and migrants.

Clarification, 7/27/23, 2:10 p.m.: The headline for this article has been clarified to reflect that Gibson is the first Indigenous artist to represent the US solo.

At its first edition, in 2019, the Toronto Biennial explored the hidden, buried, and intentionally erased histories of the Greater Toronto Area, in particular those of Indigenous and Black communities. Artist Ange Loft’s Toronto Indigenous Context Brief, a document that charts some 1,000 years of history along the city’s Lake Ontario waterfront, has served as a guiding document for the biennial’s curatorial team as well as the artists involved.

While the 2019 edition focused on exploring the histories of the lake’s waterfront and shoreline, the 2022 iteration has moved more inland. This year the venues include the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Mercer Union, Arsenal Contemporary, the Fort York National Historic Site, and the Textile Museum of Canada. Its two main venues are at adapted spaces: 72 Perth Avenue in the city’s West End and the Small Arms Inspection Building in nearby Mississauga.

Among the artists who will show new work are Jeffrey Gibson, Judy Chicago, Camille Turner, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Eduardo Navarro, Syrus Marcus Ware, Susan Schuppli, and Eric-Paul Riege. Brian Jungen, Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, and Denyse Thomasos will also be represented by preexisting works.

To learn more about the Biennial and how its planning has changed over the past two and a half years, ARTnews spoke with the exhibition’s curatorial team—Candice Hopkins, senior curator; Tairone Bastien, exhibitions curator; and Katie Lawson, curator—by Zoom in February.

ARTnews: The plan for the Toronto Biennial was always that the first two editions would have the same curatorial team, so that artists could develop projects that could be shown at either iteration or both. Why did that feel like an important move?

Tairone Bastien: We saw it as an opportunity to work with artists who had deep research practices, who develop their ideas slowly over time, to allow them the time to experiment, to think about their projects iteratively, and to grow with them. This was the first biennial for the city. It was our first time doing such a show at such a scale in the city, so we were learning a lot about the places that we were working with: the shoreline and the waterways, which are really important to us. A lot of the research we were doing was in parallel with the research that the artists were doing, so we saw it as a way to dialogue with them over the course of these four years.

An example of a project that has stayed with us over the course of these four years is by Syrus Marcus Ware. He was one of the first artists we met with in 2018 ahead of the first edition of the biennial. At the time, he had just finished collaborating on a theater production. He was mostly known for large-scale portraits of fellow activists. At the end of our first studio visit, we asked him, “What are some ideas or projects that you would want to do, but just haven’t been able to because of time or opportunity?” He stopped and said, “Well, I am working on this story about a kind of future world in which this group of QTBIPOC folks set out to develop their own society, their own place of freedom, and abolish the ways of the current world.” We loved the idea, and he just really needed time to think through how he was going to do that. So we stayed with him over the course of the last four years. We presented an iteration of the work called Antarctica in 2019, and in this next edition, we’ll be presenting the final chapter in the story, which he calls MBL: Freedom. That will be presented as a film and installation.

Jeffrey Gibson, I AM YOUR RELATIVE, MOCA Toronto, 2022. Co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art.

You mentioned the research that you that you as a curatorial team were also doing around the Greater Toronto area and how that is very tied to what the Biennial is trying to do. Can you talk about what that research process looked like from a curatorial standpoint in terms of this region’s own history?

Bastien: I had recently moved to Toronto, and I was particularly interested in the immigrant narratives of Toronto. There was an area of Toronto called the Ward, which was really the first racialized immigrant neighborhood in the city, where a lot of the first Italians, the first Chinese, the first Black communities formed. And in the 1950s, this entire area was demolished and basically obliterated off the map, and a lot of those communities had to move to other parts of the city—more marginalized areas of the city. I was fascinated by this idea that you have a city that claims to be very multicultural and very diverse, when, in fact, it has erased a lot of those multicultural histories.

Katie Lawson: Each of us has different points of entry to the different layers that make up the context here in Toronto. For me, that has largely been thinking about geologic scales of time as a way to connect to less human-centered stories of the land and the water. For me, it’s been looking at the ways that these stories are hidden in plain sight and that there are constituent elements of our environment that give us clues about those stories which stretch back millions of years. Whether it’s the extensive urban ravine system—Toronto has the largest urban ravine system in North America, and it’s this topographical remnant of the way that a glacier moved and melted and froze over thousands of years—or the lakes and buried tributaries throughout the city. There are many rivers that have been buried across the city, which have been a real focal point for us in thinking about the ways that we can reconnect to the stories that are held in the water and in the land. This is the idea that we speak to in our curatorial vision in thinking about land and water as archives, as holding histories from time to time.

Candice Hopkins: This idea that the water and the land both hold history—for me, what I was interested in was this colonial gesture of burying the waterways. I consider it a form of settler sublimation and a way to try to dominate the landscape. Even with those efforts of domination, they’re never fully successful. There are underground rivers, the lost river system of Toronto. We wanted to think of those fugitive waterways as a metaphor for how we can move through spaces, even if there are barriers that are put up. I think for the artists, it also became a metaphor for working for resistance, and thinking about the view of an entire ecosystem. That’s really evident in works like what Ange Loft did. When we started to speak with her about the first edition of the biennial, she said, “Well, the geographic boundaries”—the two main venues of the biennial—“also mimic the boundaries of the original Toronto Purchase.” So, there was a kind of a further uncovering of what this Agreement was, the way that it was deliberately mistranslated with regard to Indigenous people at the time, and thinking about how much the decolonial process necessitates a kind of fuller understanding of history. So we see the biennial as one of the venues in which to do that.

Installation drawing for Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s commission for the Toronto Biennial of Art venue at 72 Perth parking lot.

Katie, you mentioned viewing land and water as an archive. Can you expand on that a bit?

Lawson: I’ll give two examples of artist projects that take up that idea in different ways, whether it’s thinking about that more literally or in a more kind of expanded, poetic, or metaphorical way. In a more literal way, I think of artists like Susan Schuppli and her long-term project, Learning from Ice, which is one of the commissions that stretches over the two editions of the biennial. She did circumpolar research with the Ice Core archives in 2019. That work looks at the ways in which frozen water, especially as it melts in a warming world, reveals to us on a molecular level certain things about our planet that were previously unknown, or gives a broader view to this aspect of geologic time and allows us to look back in order to look forward to imagine what this path that we’re on with climate change could lead us.

For 2022, we’re working with Camille Turner. I feel like we’ve had such generative conversations with her over the last few years, particularly as she is an artist researcher who focuses on Canada’s often hidden histories and ties to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When we started doing studio visits with her, she had spent time in Newfoundland looking into the building of slave ships on the eastern coast of Canada. But what was so fascinating, for us, was that Camille was thinking about the ways in which the trees that had been taken down to build those slave ships carried certain histories with them. The stones that act as ballast in the slave ships hold histories with them that are lost from other archives. The ocean itself is a kind of archive which holds the stories that otherwise are not captured in terms of that period of history. And so that’s perhaps a more poetic way of thinking about how the very materials around us have been witness to certain events and should be considered as part of an expanded archive.

Jumblies Theatre & Arts with Ange Loft’s installation Talking Treaties, 2019, presents the objects that British gave to the Mississauga of the Credit to buy their ancestral lands in the so-called Toronto Purchase. The Mississauga understood it as simply a gift, not a payment. The work was featured in the 2019 edition of the Toronto Biennial.

Several works in the biennial look at Canada’s history of involvement with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Many people might wrongfully assume that Canada has no real connection to it. Why did that become a focus?

Bastien: We’d always seen Ange’s Toronto Indigenous Context Brief as something that would be added to. Thinking about the interlacing of different narratives, it’s not just the Indigenous histories that have been buried, it’s also Black histories. Adding to that, with this edition, we’ve invited writer Yaniya Lee and Camille Turner to together create another layer to this context. They are bringing up stories of different Black experiences within Toronto that are very under-recognized and that need to be re-revived to rethink our relationships to this place.

We recognize that this is something that is an ongoing process. A number of artists that are here in Toronto are deeply engaged in this work and deeply engaged in rethinking histories and art histories have elided the Black experience as well as Black artists. Adding someone like Denyse Thomasos to the exhibition is really important because here’s an artist who is Trinidadian-Canadian, who died sadly very young, but who left a really big impact on the arts community here. Her paintings, which are of the bellies of slave ships and immense architectures, still hold a lot of psychic energy and residual impact on the people who work here.

A lot of these histories are really critical to rethinking and decolonizing our understanding of Toronto, but also of Canada and its relationships. We know more and more through historical research that there were slaves in Toronto, that a number of the founding fathers of this country owned slaves, that they had plantations in the Caribbean from which they were drawing their wealth. When slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, it wasn’t for another 20 to 30 years that it was actually outlawed completely in Canada. And so, all of the nuances of what really happened need to be uncovered and told.

Hopkins: One thing that Camille shared when she started doing this research is that the information was right there. She started working in archives in Newfoundland initially to gather an accurate number of the ships that were made, for example. But one thing she said—and Yaniya also spoke to this—is that if the information is there, why is it still not known? What I think is smart about their project for this edition of the biennial is that it also puts the onus on the reader or the participant in part to think about that responsibility we all have as individuals to know this history if we don’t know already intimately. Through their work as well, they’re pointing to all of these other archives that exist, of which there are multiple. It’s fascinating that even if these histories and these narratives are there, gathered, and known, the bigger question is: Why isn’t it mainstream knowledge, and why aren’t people paying attention?

Lawson: These cycles of amnesia, even if they’re right in front of us, came up in conversation with artists about the context of Toronto. Something happens where they become buried again and again, so there’s this perpetual cycle of uncovering.

Nadia Belerique, HOLDINGS, 2020-ongoing. Installation view “2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone,” 2021, New Museum, New York.

Why was it important not only for Ange Loft and Camille Turner to contribute to the context documents but also be commissioned to create new work as artists for the biennial?

Hopkins: Ange’s Brief was commissioned by the biennial almost as a foundational document for us. It was foundational not only for us as curators, but also for artists. That document was shared with all of the artists in the 2019 biennial. We also shared it with some of our partners, including the City of Toronto. Nothing like it had existed before. One of the concerns that Ange had is that she didn’t want to fix history. In the original Brief, she also traced things like rumors or, in some cases, speculation, because that’s how oral history is sometimes passed down. She was interested in gaps in the historical record as well, making them known.

From there, her project grew into a book that will be published as part of the Biennial called the Treaty Guide for Torontonians. When Ange and her colleagues were working on this, they called it—and I love this—“A Game of Colonial Pursuit.” They’ve created narrative arcs through history in an incredibly exciting way. What it’s trying to do is talk about the jurisdictions, the legal responsibility of treaties, and essentially the founding of the City of Toronto in an entirely different way. That’s an example of how exhibitions like this can contribute to public knowledge and how artists contribute to public knowledge. We wanted to support them in that, and that was also the thinking behind the commissioning of Camille and Yaniya, which took an entirely different role and form. It’s not a book. It’s a way to continue that contribution, which is definitely a resource. But we didn’t want to replicate extractive methods of putting knowledge out into the world, but instead creating spaces of agency for people to learn alongside these works.

Lawson: Camille and Yaniya’s work also differs from Ange’s because the project exists as a series of cards they coauthored. Each card offers of a glimpse into a particular site, person, or part of the Black experience in Toronto. They are working with our Public Programing and Learning team to develop that as a part of this program called the Mobile Arts Curriculum, which is a set of tools that are co-created with artists and intended to be intergenerational arts education tools. They solicit or invite a sense of curiosity and a furthering of engaging with the stories that that are already in front of us.

In the 2019 edition, Ange Loft collaborated with her Jumblies Theatre & Arts troupe to create Talking Treaties, an installation and series of three videos about the various broken and one-sided treaties that stole Indigenous lands to create Toronto. Can you preview her contribution for this new edition?  

Lawson: Working with artists across both editions has been very generative for us. It’s special way of working with artists in a more iterative way. The Toronto Indigenous Context Brief came out of work that Ange had already been doing with Jumblies Theatre & Arts around ideas of governance and sustainability of the land, with the lighthearted theatrical production Talking Treaties. For 2022, Ange has made a new video work called Dish Dances, which will be at Historic Fort York. It’s a way of focusing on this concept of the dish with one spoon, which is the fundamental idea of taking only what is required and making sure that all living beings are able to sustain their own lives. This is a teaching in the Great Lakes region from Indigenous communities that have been here for time immemorial. The work is a way animate this concept and to, as Candice said, contribute to a sense of public knowledge about these ideas.

It was seems as though it was important to focus on the local histories, both known and unknown, where this biennial is sited, as opposed to just bringing a range of contemporary artists to Toronto, as other biennials often do.

Hopkins: From the beginning, we knew we wanted to create an exhibition that was site-specific, first starting from the shoreline and then, as we’ve mentioned, moving up the various tributaries inland into the city. One of the ways to do that is to invite artists to come and see the spaces in person and to support the production of new work. We do consider the biennial to be a commissioning one, which is different than some other models based on existing work. It’s also broadly international. The majority of our audience is, of course, people from Toronto and people from Canada, but we work with artists from all over the world, in part because having their perspectives on this place is important to support. We also wanted an exhibition that reflected Toronto. We didn’t want replicate some of the already well-known issues of biennials since their proliferation in the ’90s, when artists and even curators who wouldn’t spend much time in a particular place.

We’ve spoken about starting at the shoreline and moving inland. How did you decide on the titles for the two editions: “The Shoreline Dilemma” for 2019 and “What Water Knows, the Land Remembers” for 2022?

Hopkins: The “shoreline dilemma” is a term that we came upon. It comes out of the fact that shorelines—and even mountain ranges, for example—can’t be easily quantified. They can’t be easily measured because they’re always constantly changing. For us, that was inspiring because they’re resisting any kind of conventional methods of inquiry. The focus on the shoreline was also because it’s a part of Toronto that hadn’t been paid too much attention. The city itself, in a way, feels like it’s turned its back to the water. The title “What Water Knows, the Land Remembers” is inspired by our research into water and land as archives. One thing that we learned over the course of our research is that soil quite literally is an archive, too. Soil slowly moves upward over hundreds or thousands of years, so in a way, it’s always revealing its past to us—but only if we pay attention. I thought that was an amazing idea: it’s constantly shifting and fluid. It’s not fixed. For me, that represents a kind of sublimation of colonial history, bringing forward stories that governed the land before. This idea of remembering is part of the ethos of what we’re trying to do and what many artists are trying to do. That is this question of what we pay attention to and why.

The curatorial statement for this edition explores kinship, relationships, ancestors, and inheritance. Why these focuses?

Bastien: Thinking deeply about our relationship to this place means that kinship has really seeped into all of our thinking. It stemmed from our conversations with artists and looking at the work they’re making, which are drawing on expansive notions of kinship and relationality. Some works bring our attention to other ways of knowing and being in the world: perceiving land, water, and animal as kin rather than as objects or as resources to be extracted or turned into capital. Other works still are by artists who are reconsidering their own stories, which are often ignored by official narratives or stories that may have been broken or ruptured as you trace them back in time, like Indigenous communities who have had their histories and families torn apart by colonization. These artists are reviving traditions, renewing their connection to place and to communities, and re-narrating their own stories. Some are even creating new mythologies. Others are interrogating colonial systems of private property, borders and nations that divide people and places in these very inhumane and terrifying ways. Kinship really did stand out for us as one of the main ideas in this thinking.

Hopkins: It was also a response to the alienation that has emerged from the pandemic, but even before that, we were thinking about how things like capital produces certain forms of alienation. One of the questions that we posed to artists in 2019 was: What does it mean to be in relation? They interpreted that in various ways, even as a way to critique the fact that we aren’t [in relation]. Kinship is also relational, whether it’s familial or not. What is the relationship between the human and more-than-human, let’s say? We were inspired by artists who are thinking about: What does it mean for water to be kin? What does it mean for water to have agency? Susan Schuppli’s Learning from Ice project thinks how ice is evidence and is now used as evidence in the court of law to show how climate is changing. So in a way, it’s a kind of material witness. With kinship, there is also a question of various forms of agency.

Lawson: With agency, there’s also a number of artists who are taking up this question of kinship and thinking about chosen artistic lineages. Aki Onda is presenting a work that grew out of a séance to connect with Nam June Paik.

Judy Chicago in collaboration with Pyro Spectaculars by Souza, Diamonds in the Sky, 2021, fireworks performance in Belen, New Mexico.

One of this edition’s major commissions is a new fireworks piece by Judy Chicago. Previously, there has been controversy surrounding the presentations of these works, including the cancelation of one as part of Desert X in 2021. What ecological measures have been taken for the presentation of this work? Why did it feel important to present this work within the context of the exhibition?

Hopkins: We showed her series of “Atmosphere” photographs in the first edition, and we have been talking with Judy for quite some time about the possibility of having a smoke sculpture for Toronto. This will be the first smoke sculpture commissioned for Canada. It was made specifically for the waterfront, so the palette she’s been working with is reflective of the water itself. The smoke bombs are safe for people. They’re technically a pigment and they disperse within about 15 minutes. We’ve been working closely with Judy and her pyro team to mitigate any risk and to ensure that there is no residue that’s left on the water. One of the concerns with her prior work for Desert X was also the sound, so there are no sonic pyrotechnics that are part of this. This piece for Toronto is simply smoke that dissipates. It’s important to or recall the history of these works. When Judy started making them, they were really in response to a very male-dominated history of Land art, like Michael Heizer’s monuments, which were literally moving earth and created long term change in really sensitive environments, often deserts. Judy wanted to do something that had the lightest touch possible. It’ll be out on a barge that’s 100 feet from the shoreline. There’s the possibility, then, to see it at more of a distance than the one she did at the de Young museum [in San Francisco as part of her career retrospective there]. For Judy, what’s important is the way that the different colors start to merge with one another.

Can you talk about the education and public programs components of the biennial? How do you want to connect with the visitors rather than simply having them come to see the work on view?

Lawson: This time around, because of the pandemic, there’s a slightly different model from 2019. Our public programing team is working on programs that can be hybrid and live online, to reach a broader audience. Also a large number of programs are going to be outdoors. There’s a series of programs that are all based on walks, thinking about them as an embodied way of experiencing the land. There’s also food-based programing in connection with Derya Akay’s project, Queer Dowry, which will offer food to a number of existing community groups in the Greater Toronto Area as a means of enacting reciprocal hospitality. One of the groups that Derya is intending to invite to share this moment of having food together is Salaam Canada, which is an existing community for queer and trans Muslim youth. Derya identified this opportunity to give back and offer them space together, especially after being isolated during the pandemic. There are so many other things: podcasts, on-site libraries that give visitors an opportunity to have an entry point to the deep thinking that we’ve been doing over the last few years. Also, there is the Mobile Arts Curriculum, which focuses on how a biennial can contribute to art education.

Another important aspect is partnerships with funders like the Women Leading Initiative, which helped co-commission several new works, as well as local organizations.  

Hopkins: Right from the beginning, we wanted to respond to a tendency of biennials to come to a place, take over, and take resources from museums, galleries, and other spaces that have existed for a long time. We see ourselves as further supporting and working alongside and in partnership with institutions that are in the city already. Examples include parallel exhibitions that are happening at the same time, like one by Tanya Lukin Linklater at Oakville Galleries or working alongside an organization like Fort York in Toronto, which is a historic site where Ange’s work will be situated and whom we’ve worked with to develop her presentation. Biennials are their own economies, so we thought about we co-commissioning. One example of that is, with the Front International triennial [in Cleveland], we’ve co-commissioned Andrea Carlson’s new work. Sometimes there’s this anxiety of ownership or newness with biennials, but we did not want to kind of fall into that.

Andrea Carlson, Cast a Shadow, 2021. (Click to enlarge.)

From both a logistical and curatorial standpoint, how has the pandemic impacted the biennial?

Hopkins: One thing we’ve been thinking about is accessibility. If it is hard for larger groups to gather, whether indoors or outdoors, can we possibly stream that work so it’s also available online? Instead of putting as much emphasis as we did previously to an audience from outside Toronto, we’re thinking about the neighborhoods that are around each of the venues, understanding that the majority of our audience this time will likely be highly local, which is a good thing. It’s about galvanizing those forms of relationships at this moment. One of the commitments that we’ve made for the biennial is that it’s free and publicly accessible. That’s has definitely required a lot of pivoting when making a biennial.

Absolutely the context of the pandemic will shift the way that the biennial is viewed as well. Certain works, like Brian Jungen’s “Plague Masks,” became important to include because they point not just to the present moment, but also to the ways in which infectious disease has affected different populations of over different points in time. We can’t forget that. Even though we’re living through this now, different populations, particularly Indigenous ones, have lived through this the past. Another point of inspiration, brought to us by our former colleague Clare Butcher, is to consider what it actually means to breathe together when doing so is incredibly risky. This meant shifting in some cases to support artists completely remotely because there wasn’t the possibility of travel.

Brian Jungen, Plague Mask 3 (fever dream), detail, 2020.

Bastien: The pandemic definitely did hinder things a bit, like not being able to bring artists to Toronto to do site visits, which was an important part of 2019. But we did find creative ways of working with artists and working with each other. One artist whose project that really gestated within this moment is Eduardo Navarro. The idea for the Wind Oracle came from him being isolated at home in Buenos Aires and then for some time in Uruguay. He’s thinking about this idea of breathing together or sharing air, and how there is a lot of anxiety built around it. His work is already very much about bringing people into relationship with the natural environment. He wanted to create something that was also Covid-proof, like an outdoor sculpture. Even before the pandemic, artists were already thinking about ways they could make work without having to travel, to not have as big of an ecological or environmental impact. So he came up with a way that he can produce the work here, and to not have to produce there and have it travel or necessarily return [to his studio]. We’re thinking about how the materials of the work can be then donated or reused.

Hopkins: When we started this journey, we understood that biennials are also economies of means, so we were thinking about how we could have a lighter ecological or environmental footprint. I think that artists are often the best innovators, and they started thinking about this almost right away. For many artists, the focus went right to our immediate surroundings. It’s not just in response to the pandemic, which definitely had this way of highlighting inequity right away. I think maybe we’ve stopped paying attention to that as much as we did at the beginning of the pandemic. We thought carefully about what we invest in, what we produce, how we can produce a biennial that is less wasteful. We were thinking more deeply about what’s absolutely necessary and what’s not.

What do you hope viewers will take away from seeing this exhibition?

Bastien: I hope people leave with a new—or possibly renewed—appreciation for the diverse stories of this place that are often buried or under-recognized.

Hopkins: I’ve always hoped that it offers the opportunity to see a place that you think that you might know differently.

Lawson: Part of what drives me to curatorial work is that you can work in such a way that you’re facilitating or building curiosity for a public, to think about different ways of being or relating to their surroundings or to others.