Atatiana Jefferson was devoted to her family and had moved into her mother's Fort Worth home earlier this year to help as her mom's health declined, relatives said.
With her mother in the hospital, Jefferson and her 8-year-old nephew were the only two people home early Saturday when a police officer fired a gunshot through a back window, killing Jefferson.
The 28-year-old Jefferson, who family members sometimes called "Tay," and her nephew had devoted their night to Call of Duty and were still up playing the video game when the officer shot. They had the front door of the home open to let the cool breeze in, said Lee Merritt, an attorney for Jefferson's family.
"They did that all night — from sunset until the time that they lost track of time ... when they heard someone prowling around in the bushes," Merritt said during news conference with her family Monday.
"He and his Auntie Tay experienced the fear of someone prowling in the backyard," Merritt said. "His Auntie Tay did not allow him to check the window, she checked herself."
The white Fort Worth officer, responding to a call from a neighbor who was concerned about the open door, fired a split-second after shouting at the black woman to show her hands. Police bodycam video shows the officer didn't identify himself as police.
He resigned Monday and was later charged with murder.
Amber Carr said her sister, Jefferson, loved spending time with her nephews.
"My sister, the relationship she has with my sons is undescribable. Sometimes people think that they are her kids and not mine," said Carr, who also has a 4-year-old son.
She said the last time she spoke to her sister was a week before she was killed.
"She came to the hospital in Plano where I was recovering from a major heart surgery. She came and brought me food, she brought me a new cellphone," Carr said at the news conference.
Jefferson loved playing basketball and video games with the 8-year-old, but she also helped him understand he had to be responsible for getting himself ready for school each morning and wrote out a schedule so he could be organized, Carr said.
"She helped him become more independent and self-sufficient," she said.
Jefferson grew up in the Dallas area. She graduated from Xavier University of Louisiana in 2014 with a bachelor's degree of science in biology, and her family said she worked from home selling medical equipment.
Another sister, Ashley Carr, who read from a statement prepared by the family, described Jefferson as "a smart, ambitious, kind person with an adventurous spirit." She also called her a hard worker.
She was good about saving money, the family said after the news conference. They had been paying someone to cut the grass at the mother's home, but Jefferson bought a lawn mower and weed eater when she moved in and even taught her nephew how to mow.
When Carr picked the 8-year-old up at a facility where police had taken him after Jefferson was killed, it was the boy who told his mother about the shooting.
In the days since, the child has been the one comforting his mother. Carr said she can see Jefferson's loving influence in the boy's actions.
"In the middle of the night when I'm crying, he wakes up and tells me to breathe in my nose and out my mouth," Carr said at the news conference. "He holds me, he hugs me."
VENICE. Italy (AP) — Jeffrey Gibson’s takeover of the U.S. pavilion for this year’s Venice Biennale contemporary art show is a celebration of color, pattern and craft, which is immediately evident on approaching the bright red facade decorated by a colorful clash of geometry and a foreground dominated by a riot of gigantic red podiums.
Gibson, a Mississippi Choctaw with Cherokee descent, is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. For context, the last time Native American artists were included was in 1932.
Gibson, 52, accepts the weight of the honor, but he prefers to focus on how his participation can forge greater inclusion going forward.
“The first is not the most important story," Gibson told The Associated Press this week before the pavilion’s inauguration on Thursday. “The first is hopefully the beginning of many, many, many more stories to come."
The commission, his first major show in Europe, comes at a pivotal moment for Gibson. His 2023 book “An Indigenous Present" features more than 60 Indigenous artists, and he has two major new projects, a facade commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Gibson’s eye-catching exhibition titled “the space in which to place me," features text in beadwork sculptures and paintings taken from U.S. founding documents, music, sermons and proverbs to remind the viewer of the broken promises of equity through U.S. history. The vibrant use of color projects optimism. In that way, Gibson’s art is a call to action.
“What I find so beautiful about Jeffrey’s work is its ability to function as a prism, to take the traumas of the past and the questions about identity and politics and refract them in such a way that things that realities that have become flattened … can become these beautiful kaleidoscopes, which are joyous and celebratory and critical all at the same time," said Abigail Winograd, one of the exhibition’s curators.
“When I see people walk through the pavilion and kind of gasp when they walk from room to room, that’s exactly what we wanted," Winograd said.
Entering the pavilion, the beaded bodices of sculptures in human form are emblazoned with dates of U.S. legislation that promised equity, the beading cascading into colorful fringe. A painting quotes George Washington writing, “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth," in geometric letters that meld into a colorful patterned background.
By identifying specific moments in U.S. history, Gibson said that he wants to underline that “people who are fighting for equity and justice today, we’re not the first.
“This has been a line in the history of American culture. But I’m hoping that people will think about why … some of these things … have either been revoked or have not come into fruition,” he said.
Craft is at the center of Gibson’s art, both in defiance of past denigration of craft and as a way to confront “the traumatic histories of Native American people,” he said.
“There is something very healing about the cycle of making," Gibson explained.
The pavilion’s intricate beaded sculptures owe a debt to Native American makers of the past without imitating them, employing couture techniques to create something completely new. In the way of his forbears, Gibson uses beads sourced from all over the world, including vintage beads from Japan and China, and glass beads from the Venetian island of Murano.
Paper works incorporate vintage beadwork purchased from websites, estate and garage sales in mixed media displays that honor the generations of Native American makers that preceded him.
Gibson's themes fit well into the message of inclusion of the main Biennale exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque -- Strangers Everywhere,” which runs in tandem with around 90 national pavilions from April 20-Nov. 24.
His personal history has placed him firmly in what he calls the “diasporic history of Indigenous people.” His father's job took his family abroad when he was a child to Germany and then South Korea, and he later studied in Chicago and London. His partner is Norwegian artist Rune Olsen.
Through all of this, Gibson has picked up traditions and practices that go beyond his Indigenous background.
“I’ve looked at op art, pattern and decoration. I've looked at psychedelia, I have taken part in rave culture and queer culture and drag and the whole spectrum," Gibson said.
"And so for me, I would not be telling you the whole truth if I only chose to spoke about indigeneity. But my body is an Indigenous body — it’s all funneled through this body,'' he said. ”And so my hope is that by telling my experience, that everyone else can project their own kind of intersected, layered experience into the world.”
Artist Jeffrey Gibson, right, poses with artist Mark Bradford at the U.S. pavilion during the media open day at the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Visitors look at sculptures on display inside the US pavilion by artist Jeffrey Gibson during the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Visitors look at sculptures on display inside the US pavilion by artist Jeffrey Gibson during the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Visitors look at sculptures on display inside the US pavilion by artist Jeffrey Gibson during the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Visitors look at sculptures on display inside the US pavilion by artist Jeffrey Gibson during the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
From left, Curator Abigail Winograd, artist Jeffrey Gibson, and Curator Kathleen Ash-Milby pose at the US pavilion during the media open day at the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
From left, Curator Abigail Winograd, artist Jeffrey Gibson, and Curator Kathleen Ash-Milby pose at the US pavilion during the media open day at the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Artist Jeffrey Gibson poses at the US pavilion during a media open day at the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Artist Jeffrey Gibson, right, poses with artist Mark Bradford at the U.S. pavilion during the media open day at the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Artist Jeffrey Gibson, right, hugs artist Mark Bradford at the U.S. pavilion during media open day of the 60th Biennale of Arts exhibition in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Artist Jeffrey Gibson poses inside the US pavilion during the media open day at the 60th Biennale of Arts in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. A Mississippi Choctaw of Cherokee descent, Gibson is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. Gibson mixes Western modernism and Native American craft in his vibrantly hued paintings and sculptures. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
