M+B is pleased to announce its participation at The Armory Show 2020 from March 5 - 8 in New York City. Please visit us in the Focus Section, curated by Jamillah James, on Pier 90, Booth F5 where we will be presenting new ink on canvas paintings by Mark Thomas Gibson.
Gibson’s personal lens on American culture stems from his multipartite viewpoint as an artist—as a black male, a professor, an American history buff and comic book aficionado. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through languages of painting and the comic book vernacular, revealing a vision of a dystopic America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story.
In this new body of work, Gibson describes the common factor of white supremacy that plays so much in the vision and violence of American society. From the Charlottesville riots to the governing body in the Senate, the paintings describe the flailing death throes of a system, which has marginalized people by race, gender and sexuality for centuries. In Brer Gibson and the Marshmallow Baby, the artist retells the Uncle Remus fable Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, recasting the Tar Baby as a Klansman effigy, formed from a sticky, marshmallow-like substance. Much like the Remus fable, Brer Gibson is confronted with the symbol of white supremacy and finds himself physically trapped with the object of his ire. This entwined relationship distorts the body and mind of those who enter it, leaving the individual trapped. The artist imbues these works with a dark humor, a necessary salve in troubled times. By employing a direct and unedited drawing method, he is able to riff on the traditions of improvisation, humor, the comic and the grotesque by way of image-making and technique.
Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2013, where he was the recipient of the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Award. Gibson’s work was most recently on view in the solo exhibitionThe Dangerous One at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He has also exhibited at Fredericks & Freiser in New York and Loyal in Stockholm, and participated in the group shows The Curator’s Eggs, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; Woke!, Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa; and A Being in the World, Salon 94, New York. In 2016, Gibson co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo at 32 Edgewood Gallery, Yale School of Art. The show examined evolving perspectives of Black identity in American culture and history from 1912 to 2016, andgarneredreviews in The New York Times and Art in America. The artist released his first book, Some Monsters Loom Largein 2016 with funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. The book was recently re-issued in a second edition in partnership with International Print Center, New York. Gibson’s second book Early Retirement was released in 2017 with Edition Patrick Frey in Zurich and was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Gibson teaches at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
For press, please contact info@mbart.com.
For a preview of the booth, please click here.
Location
Pier 90 and Pier 94
711 12th Avenue
New York, New York 10019
VIP Preview by Invitation
Wednesday, March 4, 11am-8pm
Hours
Thursday, March 5, 12-8pm
Friday, March 6, 12-8pm
Saturday, March 7, 12-7pm
Sunday, March 8, 12-6pm
