This fall, the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C will present Jeffrey Gibson: A Real Love Thing, a focused presentation that explores the past decade of acclaimed artist Jeffrey Gibson’s interdisciplinary practice across sculpture, photography, printmaking, textile, and painting. On view from Oct. 27, 2026, through March 13, 2027, the exhibition brings together 15 works that explore the use of poetic text and visual rhythm in Gibson’s practice, from embedded song lyrics and phrases to the repetitions of color, pattern, and form. Gibson will also deliver the fourth Sam Gilliam Lecture at the Center on Nov. 12, 2026, joining a series of prominent artists and thinkers who have come to the university’s D.C. hub to consider the intersections of contemporary art, academia, and public policy.
A Real Love Thing showcases Gibson’s poetic sensibility and use of beauty as a strategy for catalyzing our collective imagination toward a more connected, compassionate future. This ethos is captured in the exhibition’s title, which draws from a 1971 interview with Marvin Gaye, the D.C.-born singer, songwriter, and soul icon, who in describing his album What’s Going On said: “I think I’ve got a real love thing going. I love people, I love life, and I love nature, and I can’t see why other people can’t be like that.”
The featured works illustrate Gibson’s distinctive visual language that blends Indigenous materials and symbolism with popular culture, music, and queer iconography. The presentation includes the never-before-seen painting, All the things that led to this exact moment (Deep Blue) (2026); Don’t Make Me Over (2024), a beaded and hand-dyed garment installation from Gibson’s MASS MoCA exhibition POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT (2024-2026); the mixed media wall cloak ANGEL OF MY SOUL DON’T LET ME GO (2025); and Keep On Moving (2019), the quilted banner that hung in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art during the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Building on the exhibition’s themes, Gibson’s November lecture will explore the intersections of art, wellness, and compassion. Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is of Cherokee descent, will be in conversation with Dr. Melissa Walls. PhD (Couchiching First Nation and Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe), co-director of the Center for Indigenous Health and a Bloomberg Professor of American Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The free public lecture series was launched in 2025 and is made possible by the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Previous speakers include artist and poet Coco Fusco, art and cultural historian Sarah Lewis, and artist Theaster Gates.
To complement the exhibition and lecture, the Hopkins Bloomberg Center has developed programming in collaboration with the Peabody Institute. A playlist inspired by the exhibition, curated by Michael Christie, the Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Artistic Director of Ensembles at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, will be available for download in the gallery through the Bloomberg Connects app. Additionally, coinciding with the November lecture, the Center for Indigenous Health will present “Returning to Balance: Youth-Led, Strengths-Based Indigenous Arts Pathways to Health and Intergenerational Healing,” a free public event at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, supported by the university’s Nexus Awards Program.
“The Hopkins Bloomberg Center was created to give art and culture a space to cultivate dialogue across differences in the heart of the nation’s capital,” said Cybele Bjorklund, executive director of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center. “By engaging groups across our university, from the Center for Indigenous Health to the Peabody Institute, Jeffrey’s exhibition and lecture embody the spirit of our mission to bring together disciplines for important conversations.”
“It is an honor to welcome an artist of Jeffrey’s stature to the gallery, and to add his voice to the distinguished company of our previous Sam Gilliam lecturers in a dialogue about the essential role art plays in shaping our lives and the world around us,” said Caitlin Berry, director of the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery. “In his work, color, beauty, and compassion become a proposition for how we chart a path forward together, grounded in the histories and relationships that form us.”
The exhibition will also be accompanied by a catalogue featuring a newly commissioned essay by Amy Halliday, professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Jeffrey Gibson: A Real Love Thing is the fifth exhibition at the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery, which was inaugurated in October 2024. Advance reservations are requested, and admission to the gallery is free and open to the public. For more information about the exhibition and related programming, visit https://washingtondc.jhu.edu/arts-culture.
About Jeffrey Gibson
Jeffrey Gibson (American, b. 1972) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and convener celebrated for his work in painting, installation, video, and performance. For over two decades, he has examined how language, pattern, and music construct meaning, synthesizing Indigenous and Western traditions through vibrant color, complex patterning, and layered sound. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson represented the U.S. at the 2024 Venice Biennale with his acclaimed exhibition the space in which to place me, which made its U.S. debut at The Broad in Los Angeles in May 2025. In June 2025, he unveiled a site-specific installation at Kunsthaus Zürich. Gibson was selected for the Metropolitan Museum’s 2025 Genesis Facade Commission, and his monumental bronze sculptures will be on view through June 2026. His work is held in major collections including MoMA, the Whitney, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and is artist-in-residence at Bard College.