Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Your House
Jeffrey Gibson’s monument served as an homage to ingenuity of Indigenous North American peoples and cultures, to pre-Columbian Mississippian architecture, and to queer camp aesthetics. Gibson designed the multi-tiered structure to reference the earthen architecture of the ancient metropolis of Cahokia, which was the largest city of the North American Indigenous Mississippian people at its height in the thirteenth century. The earth mound of the pre-Columbian ziggurat was represented in Gibson’s multi-tiered monument with a plywood structure adorned with a vibrant surface of wheat-pasted posters. The posters integrate geometric designs inspired by the Serpent Mound, another monument of the Mississippi Valley located in Ohio, alongside texts that operate as activist slogans. Gibson also curated a series of Indigenous-led performances to activate the structure over the course of the MONUMENTS NOW exhibition.
