Jerrell's profile
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 in order 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.
