Jeffrey Gibson, Untitled, 2018. Digital photograph, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Kavi Gupta, and Roberts Projects

This conversation between curator and writer Glenn Adamson and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson will situate the indigenous craft techniques that Jeffrey Gibson employs in his residency and exhibition “The Anthropophagic Effect” alongside handcraft within a broader design history.

This program is presented on the occasion of “Jeffrey Gibson: The Anthropophagic Effect.” Multimedia artist Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, CO) is the artist-in-residence for the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s Winter/Spring R&D Season: INHERITANCE. Gibson’s exhibition will explore the material histories and futures of several Indigenous handcraft techniques and aesthetics, including Southeastern river cane basket weaving, Algonquian birch bark biting, and porcupine quillwork, as practiced by many tribes across this land long before European settlers arrived. The title “The Anthropophagic Effect” alludes to Oswald de Andrade’s legendary 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto, which argued that indigenous communities could “devour” colonizers’ culture as a way of rejecting domination and radically transforming Western culture to their own ends. Gibson notes that Indigenous crafts and designs have “historically been used to signify identity, tell stories, describe place, and mark cultural specificity,” explaining, “I engage materials and techniques as strategies to describe a contemporary narrative that