A Native American artist of Cherokee and Choctaw heritage, Jeffrey Gibson explores 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. The helmet sculptures included here were created for a 2019 exhibition at New York’s New Museum, entitled “The Anthropophagic Effect.” The phrase is derived from Oswald de Andrade’s legendary 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto, which asserted that indigenous communities could “devour” colonizers’ culture as a way to resist and radically transform Western culture. Describing his work as inspired by practices that have long predated the arrival of colonizers on the American continent, the artist says “I engage materials and techniques as strategies to describe a contemporary narrative that addresses the past in order to place oneself in the present and to begin new potential trajectories for the future.” The future ...