A color-drenched “contact high” and other tales from the Santa Fe-based mural project that brought Jeffrey Gibson’s Indigenous, queer dreamland to the Venice Biennale.
Early in her role as Jeffrey Gibson’s longest-tenured painting assistant, Kirby Crone recalls hitting a chromatic saturation point. “It would take us two weeks to finish a large piece, and some of the colors were so intensive and would vibrate so much that I started to get a twitch in my eye,” she says. “I’d go home and have solitary time, no vision, to recover from the workday.”
Times have changed since Crone’s one-on-one apprenticeship at Gibson’s former studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 2012. The gay, Choctaw and Cherokee, multimedia artist has expanded to a veritable campus (historical schoolhouse included) in Hudson Valley, New York. He now has about twenty assistants including painters and handworkers. And this spring, he opened the space in which to place me, a solo exhibition at the United States Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale, one of the preeminent contemporary art showcases in the world.
Crone spent last fall and winter jetting between New York and SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, guiding the four-month execution of a monumental mural series for the Biennale. Numerous accounts of the exhibition’s April debut lauded Gibson’s display for its high polish and superhuman scale. However, behind the pavilion’s precise geometric patterning is a Southwestern tale of sheer grit that aligns with the artist’s long-cultivated ethos of intimate community collaboration.
I let out a loud scream, obviously, because I know how competitive the selection process is.
Louis Grachos, executive director of SITE Santa Fe, remembers the instant he learned that the National Endowment for the Arts had selected Gibson for the U.S. Pavilion: June 30, 2023, at 10 pm, during a work trip to Antwerp, Belgium. “I let out a loud scream, obviously, because I know how competitive the selection process is,” he says. The news was especially momentous because Gibson is the first solo Indigenous artist to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale’s 129-year history. Moments later, reality hit for Grachos.
In his proposal, Gibson envisioned a temple for Indigenous and queer celebration, floating above the Venetian waters and overflowing with vibrational forms. Nearly every element of the show, from expansive exterior and interior murals to monumental figurative sculptures would be hand-painted or handcrafted. Its conceptual framework is as dense as its beadwork and fringe, referencing transcendent rituals (Native American ceremony and performance, queer party culture) and oppressive U.S. histories (Native American boarding schools, the objectification of Native bodies). With just ten months to close funding gaps and produce the exhibition, the calls and emails started right away between Gibson’s studio and exhibition partners SITE, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
Crone was in Upstate New York when she got the call about Venice, and she swiftly did the math on enrobing the pavilion in Gibson’s signature abstract patterns and stylized text (also known as the “Gibson Alphabet”). She had spearheaded one hand-painted mural in the lobby of SITE Santa Fe for Gibson’s 2022 survey exhibition, The Body Electric, but the other murals in that show were digitally printed.
“The handmade quality [of the pavilion] was of utmost importance for all of it—this was very intentional, this took time, and it was done out of love,” Crone says. “We thought we’d be painting [on-site in Venice], and at first I was like, minimum of two months. Then I was like, with the weather at that time of year in Venice, I don’t even think two months is enough.”
The edges of the forms must crisply assert themselves but reveal their hand-painted nature through a know-it-when-you-see-it shimmer.
SITE Santa Fe’s team, led by exhibitions manager and registrar Max Holmes, tested Polytab mural cloth panels that could be shipped to Venice for installation. That’s how the mural project landed in Santa Fe, in the narrow work zones of the extensively renovated warehouse space that has housed SITE since its founding in 1995. Seven full- and part-time SITE staffers united to paint under Crone’s supervision.
Gibson’s team sourced 297 Golden brand paint colors and three glazes for the project, which involved mapping, taping off, and painting varied numbers of coats across innumerable fields based on Gibson’s design mockups and corresponding lines on the Polytab panels. Crone calls it a maddening “paint by numbers” game, with some of the darker shades requiring even more coats than lighter, near-neon hues to reach the flat, resonant look Gibson requires.
The edges of the fields are as important as their centers: they must crisply assert themselves but reveal their hand-painted nature through a know-it-when-you-see-it shimmer. To create this effect, one must lay painter’s tape in an infinitesimal zone at the “outer edge” of the form, project contributor Sabrina Griffith explains.
Griffith, SITE’s associate registrar and principal lighting designer, has painted many backdrops and set pieces since her days as a theater tech in high school in San Jose. She was bowled over by the technical challenge of painting more than seventy panels, which required the team to strategically tape and paint disparate fields as others dried—or as they waited to restock a particular hue. Despite supply chain challenges over the 2023 holidays, the project’s pace never stuttered. (Griffith specifies, “We took our work home for Thanksgiving, but we didn’t paint on Christmas Day.”)
Bolstering each other against burnout, the SITE team experienced a more fantastical version of Crone’s ocular overwhelm. “These colors are a feast for the eyes—literally, biologically,” says Griffith. “As animals, our eyes recognize them as fruit, [so] we were actually getting a kind of ‘contact high’ from looking at them for so long.”
When everything’s rainbow-colored, the game you’re playing is, which thing are you popping at which place?
As a lighting expert, Griffith was already studying the sightlines of the pavilion, puzzling out how to balance the vivid murals in the background with equally colorful sculptural forms positioned in rooms and a courtyard. “Lighting is like creating the water that the artworks and viewers are swimming through,” she says. “When everything’s rainbow-colored, the game you’re playing is, which thing are you popping at which place?”
Griffith’s meditations underscore the expressive range of well-run exhibition design, which can involve as much creativity as the featured artist’s process. Griffith credits Holmes, her boss in the exhibitions and registrarial department, for fostering an open environment that is somewhat “buffered” from institutional higher-ups but allows for significant interchange between departments. SITE’s team has democratically dubbed itself “the scallywags.”
“We’re all teaching each other the skills we have, because you need to have shared skills to get something done,” says Griffith. “It’s survival skills, you know? This is true in many DIY spaces; you’re using whatever weird skills you can bring from your [artistic practice] to your job so that you feel more like you’re you. You feel more like a human. That’s really different from most of the contemporary art world, where the jobs get totally segregated [based on education levels].”
SITE’s interdisciplinary teamwork aligns with Gibson’s approach to running his studio, a philosophy Crone has helped foster for over a decade. Crone was studying for a semester in New York City as an undergraduate at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, when she met Gibson for coffee to discuss an academic apprenticeship. She was twenty-two, and he had just turned forty.
“He asked me if I was vegetarian or vegan or anything. My response was to giggle and say, ‘I’m from Texas,’” Crone says. As their professional dynamic bloomed, Gibson broached another subject that hadn’t come up during Crone’s Texas upbringing: queer identity. “I had actually never come across the term ‘queer’ until working for Jeff,” she says. “He kind of explained it, and I said, ‘According to your definition, yeah, that’s me.’”
After leaving Gibson’s studio for graduate school at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Crone returned full time in 2015 to his newly established Hudson Valley studio, as one of ten assistants. The operation has only grown from there, recently scaling up to accommodate the Venice project, which coincided with preparations for two gallery shows. Between Gibson’s studio and its institutional partners, over 175 people worked on the pavilion display, and Crone says Gibson’s humanist approach never wavered in the process.
“Honey attracts the most, right?” says Crone. “When you’ve been so generous for such a long time, when you finally have your chance, people want to give back.” Despite the project’s breakneck pace, Crone says the nature of her dynamic with Gibson has allowed her to treat work trips like “little residencies.” Her two fragmented months in Santa Fe for the mural project gave her abundant inspiration for a solo exhibition that opened this spring at Basilica Hudson. “Jeff and I have similar color sensibilities, but I’m not into geometrics. I do all the straight lines here so I don’t have to do any in my own work,” Crone says.
Jeff was so encouraging and warm and welcoming, and he just kept feeding us and feeding us. He was practicing one of our Indigenous values of generosity.
The Venice exhibition’s spring opening was fittingly community-oriented. Part of Gibson’s team had been in Italy for six weeks installing the show with help from SITE’s team, which included gluing the mural panels to an exterior framework between rain and gales. (Griffith calls the process “exciting jungle adventures,” cheerfully recounting scrubbing seagull poop from the building’s exoskeleton.) Gibson flew the rest of the team out to witness a jingle dance and other opening performances, and brought some of the staff back for the Institute of American Indian Arts’s educational programming in June.
Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/Diné), a student in IAIA’s low-residency MFA in Studio Arts program, planned and staged one of the June performances with her cohort. She was surprised and a bit nervous to spot Gibson in the audience for their roundtable gathering, The Space in Which We Story, which was inspired by Native American food fellowship traditions and Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series.
“Jeff was so encouraging and warm and welcoming, and he just kept feeding us and feeding us,” says Charley of her interactions with Gibson throughout the Venice trip. “He was practicing one of our Indigenous values of generosity, you know, he gave us this huge platform and trust, and it elevated our presence on a whole different scale.”
Grachos, SITE’s executive director, says that Gibson and the institutional partners behind the U.S. Pavilion exhibition are preparing a catalogue and documentary film capturing the process of bringing Gibson’s Indigenous, queer dreamland to fruition.
