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Artworks
Jeffrey Gibson
The Time The Stars Fell From The Sky, 2015Glass beads, wool, canvas, artificial sinew, brass studs, brass cones, over wood panel
30 × 40 × 3 inches (76.2 × 101.6 × 7.6 cm)Made in 2015, The Time The Stars Fell From The Sky is one of Gibson's most commanding wall-based works, and among the earliest to fully realize the flat beaded panel...Made in 2015, The Time The Stars Fell From The Sky is one of Gibson's most commanding wall-based works, and among the earliest to fully realize the flat beaded panel format he would develop alongside his figurative sculptures. The title draws from Lakota oral tradition; the Leonid meteor storm of 1833, which witnesses described as stars falling like snow, an event of such magnitude it became a fixed point in the Indigenous calendar known as the Winter Counts. That sense of a cosmic rupture recorded in communal memory runs through the surface of the work: a symmetrical chevron field drawn from Choctaw textile traditions frames a central figural form in dense red, the whole bordered by rows of brass studs and fringed with copper cones whose jingle is as much a part of the piece as the beads themselves. The work synthesizes Gibson's dual inheritances; the geometric abstraction of Minimalism and the ceremonial visual language of Native American craft; into something that belongs fully to neither and exceeds both.
Provenance
Marc Straus Gallery, New York 2014.
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2014.
Exhibitions
Power Full Because We’re Different MASS MoCA, through Sept. 2026
They Teach Love Boise Art Museum, through July 2026
Stretching the Canvas National Museum of the American Indian, through May 2027
An Indigenous Present Frist Art Museum, Nashville, through Sept. 202634of 34