Jerrell Gibbs: No Solace in the Shade

Join us for a conversation with acclaimed contemporary artist Jerrell Gibbs to celebrate the release of the first major publication on his contemplative portraits of Black sitters, capturin a prolific period of self-examination and observation.

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The first major publication on Baltimore-based painter Jerrell Gibbs, whose contemplative portraits of Black sitters thrum with a vivid sense of place and reflect the complexity and emotional depth of everyday Black life.

This book captures a prolific period of self-examination and observation for contemporary artist Jerrell Gibbs (b. 1988). Known for his luminously rendered, expressionistic oil paintings, Gibbs uses the figure as a dynamic and recurring motif to explore themes of Black masculinity, fatherhood, legacy, and remembrance.

Drawing from archival family photographs, Gibbs emphasizes placement, size, and proportion, blending intimate mark-making with bold painterly gestures. By complicating and subverting visual stereotypes, Gibbs engages deeply with the materiality of painting, offering tender, emotionally evocative portrayals of Black men as husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. These allegorical and autobiographical works underscore quiet moments of joy, sorrow, and beauty as vital components of Black life. Additionally, commissioned portraits of such figures as Elijah Cummings and August Wilson are juxtaposed with allegorical figures from Gibbs’s dreams, reflecting his growth as an artist and individual. Gibbs’s work offers a fresh approach to painting the human form, following in the footsteps of other Black figurative painters Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, and Amy Sherald.

Jerrell Gibbs explores the complexities of life by investigating his personal experiences of living and growing up in America. His paintings are composites of childhood memories centered around American life and culture, spotlighting stories of the familiar that go unnoticed. Gibbs uses everyday settings as the framework to his paintings to highlight the innumerable similarities humanity shares despite social differences.

Gibbs is committed to creating paintings that are both authentic and truthful. His paintings highlight: joy, beauty, and the extraordinary in the mundane, all components within the vastness of life. Gibbs uses the depiction of children as protagonists within his oeuvre to emphasize the lasting impact of childhood experiences on adulthood, aiming to encourage self-reflection by highlighting how our past experiences, whether positive or negative, shapes our present reality. The compositions, which are often taken from his family archive, focus on placement, scale, and proportion, as much as they do on mark-making and painterly gestures.

Gibbs graduated with an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2020. His work is in the permanent collection of the Brandywine Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the CC Foundation, and the X Museum Beijing.

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