Overview
MORE COLORS THAN THE EYE CAN SEE: The Art of Jeffrey Gibson is part of Native Knowledge 360°’s Artist Spotlight series, which features classroom-ready resources for K–12 art students and teachers. Use this Artist Spotlight to inspire students to explore the life and work of Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson.
This Artist Spotlight includes a gallery of Gibson’s artwork, the artist’s personal statement, his biography, curatorial reflections, and a video interview. It also includes sources of influence and K–12 lesson plans created by a cohort of ten educators from Oregon and New Mexico.
Use the introductory activities and lesson plans to help students explore the following:
- Grades K–12 Introductory Activities | Color Study: Before beginning specific grade-band lesson plans, consider exploring the power of color in Gibson’s work with your class.
- Grades K–2 | Power Dressing: Garment Design: How can we design a garment that expresses something about who we are?
- Grades 3–5 | Flying High: Exploring Flags & Representation: How can we use flags as an artistic medium to represent who we are and what we care about?
- Grades 6–8 | Suspended Sculpture: Creating Mobile Art: How can we use an object such as a punching bag as a blank canvas to create a mobile or suspended sculpture to express ourselves and our emotions in an artistic way?
- Grades 9–12 | Letter Forms: Designing Original Font: How can letter forms be used in art to add visual interest and express identity?
A Note for Teachers
The goal of each Native Knowledge 360° Artist Spotlight is to provide teachers and students with the resources they need to appreciate, teach, and learn about contemporary Indigenous artists and the powerful themes expressed through their art. Appreciation is defined by gratitude, enjoyment, and an informed and respectful recognition of the positive value and qualities of something. Cultural appropriation involves using elements of a culture that are not one’s own, often without understanding or permission. For the student activities and lesson plans in this Artist Spotlight, our intention is not to imitate the featured artist but rather to encourage students to explore and create original artworks. We aim to use the artist’s inspirations and core artistic themes as starting points for personal and respectful creative expression.
Academic Standards
This resource aligns with the National Core Arts Standards for Visual Arts. These standards are broken down into the following four artistic processes:
- Creating: Conceiving and developing new artistic ideas and work
- Presenting: Interpreting and sharing artistic work
- Responding: Understanding and evaluating how the arts convey meaning
- Connecting: Relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context
The Artist Spotlight series touches on all four processes across grade levels. Depending on the path teachers and students take through this resource, different standards will be met.
Essential Understandings
The National Museum of the American Indian Essential Understandings are an educational framework of key concepts based on the ten themes of the National Council for the Social Studies standards. They serve as a foundation for educational materials developed by the National Museum of the American Indian. In addition, educators, curriculum developers, administrators, and others can use these Essential Understandings to conceptualize new curricula, lessons, and learning activities. This framework can lead students to new knowledge about Native Americans as historical and contemporary people with diverse cultures and roles—namely, as diplomats and leaders, civic engineers, orators, scientists, agriculturalists, participants in global events, and much more.
This resource features the following Essential Understandings.
Culture is a result of human socialization. People acquire knowledge and values by interacting with other people through common language, place, and community. In the Americas, there is vast cultural diversity among more than 2,000 tribal groups. Tribes have unique cultures and ways of life that span history from time immemorial to the present day.
This resource addresses the following Key Concepts from Essential Understanding 1: American Indian Cultures:
- There is no single American Indian culture or language.
- American Indians are both individuals and members of a tribal group.
- For millennia, American Indians have shaped and been shaped by their culture and environment. Elders in each generation teach the next generation their values, traditions, and beliefs through their own tribal languages, social practices, arts, music, ceremonies, and customs.
The story of American Indians in the Western Hemisphere is intricately intertwined with places and environments. Native knowledge systems resulted from long-term occupation of tribal homelands and observation and interaction with places. American Indians understood and valued the relationship between local environments and cultural traditions and recognized that human beings are part of the environment.
This resource addresses the following Key Concepts from Essential Understanding 3: People, Places, and Environments:
- The story of American Indians in the Western Hemisphere is intricately intertwined with places and environments. Native knowledge systems resulted from long-term occupation of tribal homelands and observation of and interaction with places. American Indians understood and valued the relationship between local environments and cultural traditions and recognized that human beings are part of the environment.
- Long before their contact with Europeans, Indigenous people populated the Americas and were successful stewards and managers of the land, from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. European contact resulted in exposure to Old World diseases, displacement, and wars, devastating the underlying foundations of American Indian societies.
American Indians have always engaged in the world beyond the immediacy of their own communities. For millennia, Indigenous people of North America exchanged and traded ideas, goods, technologies, and arts with other tribal nations, near and far. Global connections expanded and intensified after contact with Europeans. American Indian foods, technologies, wealth, and labor contributed to the development of the modern world.
This resource addresses the following Key Concepts from Essential Understanding 9: Global Connections:
- Interactions among American Indian communities across the Americas contributed to the change, growth, and vitality of Native nations.
- Global interactions with Europeans and others had both positive and negative consequences for American Indians.
- As sovereign independent nations, American Indian tribes and their citizens are participants in global politics, economies, and other facets of contemporary life.