Jeffrey Gibson Opens a Portal in Two-Spirit Tribute at MASS MoCA

There was a lot of talk about portals earlier this month at MASS MoCA, the enormous art space in Western Massachusetts now playing home to an eye-popping, shape-shifting installation by artist Jeffrey Gibson through the winter of next year. Gibson had already been granted access to a big stage when he was chosen to represent the U.S. in this year’s Venice Biennale—the first time a Native American artist has done so with a solo show since the exhibition’s inauguration in 1895. But this is a bigger stage still, at least in literal terms: MASS MoCA’s storied Building 5, a vast column-free space in a former factory complex described as the size of a football field.

Gibson’s commissioned show “POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT” is different than his offering in Venice—more antic and animated, with an emphasis on performative gestures and an engagement with “two-spirit” states of being that figure in Indigenous LGBTQI+ culture. The exhibition is boisterous, with clubby electronic music and kinetic videos that bring life to outsize ceremonial garments hung from the ceiling above illuminated sculptures that double as dance floors.

“It was different from filling a space like in a normal exhibition,” Gibson said during a public talk at the opening. “It was more about: how do we fill this space with all the ideas of what’s happening in the work?”

While the amount of space is otherworldly (19,000 square feet in Building 5, across two floors), the art within it is earthy and homegrown. During his talk to introduce the show, Gibson said he had been inspired by the kind of collective and communal activity that he grew up with in churches and, later, dance clubs. “We talked about a disco/church,” he said of early conversations about the project. “A lot of it has to do with faith based-practices, regalia, queerness—a very welcoming space.”

View of Jeffrey Gibson’s “WE’RE POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT” at MASS MoCA.

Sharing the stage was Albert McLeod, a human-rights activist and director of the Two-Spirited People of Manitoba who Gibson invited to discuss notions of two-spirit identity that date back to the term’s origin within Indigenous queer activism. “Spirit-naming is a historic tradition, and usually children receive a spirit name when they’re born,” McLeod said. “The implication is that the spiritual realm is benevolent to humans, so we ask for a guide for that child throughout their life, because there’s lots of brambles and wolves with sharp teeth. You need a spirit guide to help you, and there’s power in the belief that we, individually, are never alone, because there’s a spirit that walks with us for the rest of our lives.”

At a gathering in 1990, McLeod and other Indigenous queer activists turned to ceremony in search of guidance. “We had heard about healers and medicine people and dream interpreters and sweat lodges, but because we were on the periphery in our own community, we didn’t know very much,” he recalled. “That particular weekend, we opened a portal and were blessed, and on that journey we received the name ‘two-spirit.’ A lot of people think it refers to sexuality or gender, but over 34 years now, it’s more than that. For me, my community’s knowledge about history, tradition, language, and philosophy is [one] spirit. The second spirit is about love: nurturing for my siblings, my parents, my grandparents, my family, my community, and my Nation. It’s not so much about sex or gender, because those will always be part of the human experience. It’s about: what is that other level of knowledge or activism or energy that we need?”

Jeffery Gibson, at right, talking with Albert McLeod and MASS MoCA chief curator Denise Markonish.

McLeod compared art museums to the kind of portal that was opened during that weekend decades ago. “Portals to a sacred space—we have those in the Indigenous community, whether it’s a sweat lodge or a sun dance, where spirit exists, spirit lives, and spirit is accessible.” Gibson described how McLeod’s conception of two-spirit as a state attainable via passage through a portal made it “feel much more like a live concept than a term of description. For me, it has to do with different kinds of Native architecture and spaces that you enter through a portal, where you can be born, reborn, transformed.”

The exhibition itself includes a portal: after entering a cavernous space lit up by video screens (which broadcast the 1992 documentary Two Spirit People plus footage Gibson assembled of two-spirit DJs, drag performers, academics, and others), a show-goer walks through a twisting architectural structure to enter the other half of the building, illuminated by light streaming through windows and filled with more hanging garments and stages on the floor. At the opening, attendees traversed it with varying degrees of curiosity and uncertainty—before some stuck around for a concert by the musician ANOHNI to mark the occasion.

ANOHNI performing at MASS MoCA.

Gibson had made a special garment for the transfixing singer to wear: a white robe-like piece bearing the stitched words “All the things that led to this exact moment.” ANOHNI wore it well throughout a set that mixed hallmark songs like “Why Am I Alive Now?” and “Another World” with heart-wrenching covers of Beyoncé’s “Crazy Right Now” and the Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” (the latter in front of footage of feted trans activist Marsha P. Johnson projected at larger-than-life size).

The next day, in an interview in a Resource Room part of the exhibition given over to archival two-spirit documents and books on the subject, Gibson credited his approach to the MASS MoCA project in part to one of his young children. “My daughter looked up at me one day and said, ‘Dada, sometimes your body changes and you forget your dreams,’” he recalled. “I was like, ‘What?! What did you just say?!’ I keep a running text to myself so I wrote it down, and I think [it applies to] the time that we’re living in. That could mean the last many, many years, but I’m going to say the last decade of going through so many movements focused on the politicizing of bodies and violence against bodies. That phrase became a backbone how this whole exhibition—especially when the term two-spirit came in, which, for me, is inclusive of the entire spectrum of genders and sexualities but also different facets of being a spiritual person.”

View of Jeffrey Gibson’s “WE’RE POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT” at MASS MoCA.

He continued, striking a note defiance and assuredness in equal measure: “It also took me back to when I was a teenager and knew I was gay, but also felt really empowered and fearless of change. I remember being like, ‘The world is changing and you’re fine—you’re going to handle it.’ As you get older, there’s something about change that becomes frightening, but I want to reconnect to feeling empowered [while] facing unknown factors. It seems like the thing we all have to be able to do right now is to move forward in the face of the unknown. We can’t know right now, on so many levels, obvious and not-obvious ones, when it comes to climate, technology, space, politics. It’s all so unknown that if we can’t feel grounded and somehow empowered in the present, we’re just going to get crushed.”