Jeffrey Gibson made history in 2024 as the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo show at the Venice Biennale. Now his beaded, song-filled art hangs between the White House and the U.S. Capitol.
His exhibition, A Real Love Thing, opened October 27 at the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery inside the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. It runs through March 13, 2027. On November 12, Gibson will give the fourth Sam Gilliam Lecture at the center, a free talk on art, wellness, and compassion.
Native people have a complicated history and painful familiarity with this street. For more than 200 years, leaders at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue made choices that hurt Native nations. They took our land, broke treaties, and tried to wipe out our cultures. Museums still often treat Native art like a relic, as if we stopped existing a century ago. Gibson pushes back with joy. His work shimmers with color and borrows freely from queer culture and pop music. It makes a simple point. Native people are still here, and we’re still making beautiful things.
Image credit: (c) Jeffrey Gibson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The show’s title comes from Marvin Gaye, the soul singer who was born in Washington. In a 1971 interview about his album What’s Going On, Gaye said, “I think I’ve got a real love thing going.” He loved people, life, and nature, he said, and couldn’t see why others didn’t feel the same. The album tackled war and poverty, but never lost its tenderness. Gibson’s art works the same way.
The 15 pieces on view cover the last decade of his career, from sculpture and photography to prints, textiles and paintings. Many use lines from songs and repeat bold patterns, like a tune that keeps circling back to its chorus.
The show debuts a 2026 painting called All the things that led to this exact moment (Deep Blue). Don’t Make Me Over (2024) is a hand-dyed garment covered in beads, sequins, and holographic vinyl, hung on pine tipi poles. It comes from Gibson’s MASS MoCA exhibit POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT.
Image credit: (c) Jeffrey Gibson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
ANGEL OF MY SOUL DON’T LET ME GO (2025) is a mixed-media cloak made to hang on a wall. Keep On Moving (2019) is a quilted banner that greeted visitors in the Whitney Museum’s lobby during its 2019 Biennial. In Dewdrops in the Garden (2025), Gibson sets glass beads and artificial sinew into a large painted canvas.
Gibson’s lecture runs from 5 to 7 p.m. and falls during Native American Heritage Month. After his talk, he’ll sit down for a fireside chat with Melissa Walls (Couchiching First Nation and Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe). She co-directs the Center for Indigenous Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Their conversation puts Indigenous ideas about wellness center stage in a city where our voices are often left out of the room. Guests must register ahead of time.
Image credit: (c) Jeffrey Gibson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The series honors Sam Gilliam, the late abstract painter who lived in Washington and cared deeply about racial equity and democracy. His large-scale work A Lovely Blue And ! hangs permanently in the Bloomberg Center. The Sam Gilliam Foundation launched the series with Johns Hopkins in 2025. Gibson follows art historian Sarah Lewis, artist Theaster Gates, and artist and poet Coco Fusco.
The Center for Indigenous Health will also host a free event tied to the lecture. Returning to Balance looks at youth-led Indigenous art programs that support health and healing across generations.
Gibson, born in 1972, is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is of Cherokee descent. After Venice, his exhibit, the space in which to place me, traveled to The Broad in Los Angeles in 2025. The same year, his giant bronze sculptures went up on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Fifth Avenue facade, where they stayed until June 2026. Museums such as MoMA, the Whitney, Crystal Bridges and the National Gallery of Art own his work. Today he lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he’s an artist-in-residence at Bard College.
Visitors can download a playlist for the show through the free Bloomberg Connects app. Michael Christie, who directs ensembles at the Peabody Institute, chose the songs.
Admission is free, but the gallery asks people to book a time slot in advance. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.
Gaye wanted more people to love the world the way he did. More than 50 years later, Jeffrey Gibson is making the same case in beads and song lyrics.
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