MARK THOMAS GIBSON’s personal lens on American culture stems from his multifaceted viewpoint as an artist—as a Black male, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through languages of drawing, painting, print, and sculpture, revealing a vision of a satirical, dystopian America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story.
Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. He is represented by Loyal in Stockholm. In 2016, he co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo; in 2024 he curated the group exhibition Edge of Echoes at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Gibson has released two artist books, Some Monsters Loom Large (2016) and Early Retirement (2017). In 2025, Gibson’s first monograph will be published by JRP Editions in conjunction with his exhibition, Overture, at the Berman Museum at Ursinus College, (Collegeville, PA).
Gibson has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency; he has been a MacDowell fellow twice. In the summer of 2023 he was an Efroymson Family Fund Visiting Artist at Ox-Bow School of Art and in the summer of 2025 he will be an artist-in-residence at Pilchuck Glass School. He has been awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, (Philadelphia, PA), a Hodder Fellowship from Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ), a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.
Gibson’s most recent solo exhibitions include Overture (The Berman Museum, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA, 2025) Lineage (The Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, 2024), Whirligig! (Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2023), and A Retelling (MOCAD, Detroit, MI, 2023). Learn more.
Bio as of 9/2026
Photo by Ryan Collerd, courtesy of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage