About the Image
By Juan-Pablo Cajiga-Pena (Art History, Philosophy, and Math '26)
Art Research Associate, Humanities Research Center (2025–26)
Jeffery Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, Colorado) is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist who works in a wide range of media, including painting, beadwork, weaving, installation, video, andarchival practices. A citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson makes images and objects that are often a synthesis of canonical modernist aesthetics andindigenous aesthetics. His work also draws from queer culture, different global sub-cultures, and pop culture.
The interconnection between Indigenous and modernist aesthetics is clear in Gibson’s 2019 work THE FUTURE IS PRESENT. The work’s triangular background pattern evokes modernism’s esteem of serial and geometric abstraction. Its vibrant color scheme refers at once to the alluring sheen of mass commercial culture and to Indigenous American aesthetics of beading and weaving.
At the center of the work, the phrase “THE FUTURE IS PRESENT” is written in a blocky font created by Gibson—often referred to as the “Gibson Alphabet.” The Gibson alphabet letters’ rigid form seems clearly distinct from their background, yet each letter’s incompleteness makes the phrase seem to bleed into its background. Analogously, the future may be distinct from the present, yet the presentcontinuously merges into the future. In this sense, the future is “present”: what the world will become is constructed out of what it is here and now.
By creating the work’s purple-hued frame, Gibson emphasizes his presence in its form and meaning.“The Future is Present” reads as a universal truth, yet it is a truth expressed via a particular visual language by a specific artist who is a member of certain communities. Coming from communities where the past is frequently emphasized, Gibson turns instead to the present—the place where the future begins to form. He prompts us to ask: when we imagine the future, who do we have in mind? Whom is this future for? What communities benefit, who or what gets left behind? The work remindsus that how we imagine the future is shaped by our place in and understanding of the present moment.
Seeing the seeds of the future as planted in the present can instill hope, as it invites us to imagine afreer, more inclusive, and more equitable world. At the same time, it can provoke horror, reminding us that the oppression, discrimination, and crises of the present may persist—and even intensify.
Gibson, as in all his work, is making here an ethical point: each of us participates in the constructionof the future. Whether we contribute to a future that fills us with hope or horror is determined by our actions and beliefs today, right now.