JERRELL GIBBS, “My worst fear is one day that you come home from school and see your father face while hearin’ about tragedy on news,” 2024 (oil, oil stick on canvas, 60 x 95 inches / 152.4 x 241.3 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
BALTIMORE PAINTER Jerrell Gibbs (b. 1988) is presenting his first solo exhibition in New York at James Cohan Gallery. “Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears” features all new oil paintings. The works explore the complexities of fatherhood and reference the storytelling of an overlooked 20th century playwright.
Capturing poignant moments, the figurative scenes have a cinematic quality. In fact, “Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears” presents a dozen works inspired by the 1977 film “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich.” The film is centered around a junior high school student living with his mother and her boyfriend. His father is absent and the teen turns to drugs in a desperate effort to temper an abiding sense of longing and abandonment.
After seeing the film, Gibbs reflected on his own situation, losing his father who was killed when he was only 7. The viewing experience inspired his latest body of work. “For Gibbs,” the exhibition press release said, “the canvas becomes a space within which he can parse the gaps and ruptures of personal memory to create works that provide portals into universal human emotional experiences.”
“Pray for the mother that has to tell her son…” (2024) is among the works on display in the exhibition. The painting depicts a young boy with his back to the viewer looking through a softly draped window into the darkness of night. Gibbs employs tones of blue, black, and brown—a beautiful, limited palette that is at once soothing and somber. The sky that holds the boy’s gaze is black, as is the bountiful display of flowers on the table at his side, conspicuous harbingers of imminent tragedy and mourning.
“Leading up to the night I found out my father was dead I would stare out of the window in anticipation of him returning home. It would never happen,” Gibbs wrote on Instagram. “While working on this piece I began to think about how my mother must have felt when she realized that she would have to tell me he was gone. I can’t imagine the pain she must’ve felt.”
The first solo exhibition of Jerrell Gibbs in New York features a dozen new paintings. The works explore the complexities of fatherhood and reference the storytelling of an overlooked 20th century playwright.
JERRELL GIBBS, “Pray for the mother that has to tell her son…,” 2024 (oil on canvas, 36 x 40 1/8 inches / 91.4 x 101.9 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
The meaning of fatherhood is ever present and looms large in the practice of Gibbs, who is now a father himself. His interest in art sprouted early on in elementary school and in middle school he sold his drawings for 25 cents. But in college, he studied business and only began to pursue his artistic talent seriously in 2014, after his wife and daughter gave him an easel and painting supplies for Father’s Day.
Born in Baltimore, Gibbs still lives and works in his hometown and received his art education there, too. In 2020, he earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A portrait by Gibbs of late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md), who represented Baltimore, is on permanent display at the U.S. Capitol. Next year, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, “Jerrell Gibbs: No Solace in the Shade,” will be on view at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pa. (Sept. 27, 2025-March 1, 2026).
In addition to fatherhood, Gibbs’s themes include Black masculinity, remembrance, the solace of home, and sense of belonging fueled by familial and communal gatherings. His references are art historical, cultural, and autobiographical, often drawing on images from a treasured family photo album. His latest work at James Cohan is informed by a particularly rich resource.
Starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield, the film “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich” is based on the classic young adult novel published in 1973 by Alice Childress (1916-1994). She wrote the screenplay for the film. While the film takes place in South Central Los Angeles, the novel is set in Harlem, a community familiar to the author.
Childress was a prolific novelist, playwright, actress, and activist. Born in Charleston, S.C., and raised in Harlem by her maternal grandmother, she was nurtured at the public library. At home, they passed time looking out of the window, spinning imagined stories about the people walking by on the street. Childress’s grandmother encouraged her to write and Shirley Graham Du Bois, the wife of W.E.B. Du Bois, was also a well of encouragement.
In 1939, Childress joined the American Negro Theatre in Harlem and performed with the likes of Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Harry Belafonte. Motivated by the limited roles available to Black women, she started penning her own plays. Her first was “Florence” (1949) and she continued to write novels and stage plays for four decades. An artist could devote their entire career to paintings informed by her work. CT
“Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears” is on view at James Cohan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, New York, N.Y., from May 3-June 15, 2024
FIND MORE about artist Jerrell Gibbs on his website and Instagram
FIND MORE about Alice Childress. Her archives are at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a 2022 episode of State of the Arts on PBS documents her life. She was a writer of “keenly observed, funny, uncompromising plays,” according to PBS
FIND MORE about plays by Alice Childress. Over the past few years, her work has been revived and produced on Broadway and in regional theaters, such as Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, where “Florence” and “Mojo” were staged in 2022. Her 1955 play “Trouble in Mind” opened on Broadway in 2021
Installation view of “Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears,” James Cohan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, New York, N.Y. (May 3-June 15, 2024). Shown, JERRELL GIBBS, Paradox (The Dox), 2024 (oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches / 152.4 x 121.9 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
Installation view of “Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears,” James Cohan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, New York, N.Y. (May 3-June 15, 2024). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
JERRELL GIBBS, “Can’t let them see me cry,” 2024 (oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches / 76.2 x 61 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
JERRELL GIBBS, “Jerry’s Kids,” 2024 (70 1/8 x 70 1/8 inches / 177.8 x 203.8 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
Installation view of “Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears,” James Cohan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, New York, N.Y. (May 3-June 15, 2024). Shown, at left, JERRELL GIBBS, “A hard head makes a soft behind,” 2024 (oil on canvas, 70 x 80 1/4 inches x 177.8 x 203.8 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
JERRELL GIBBS, “What happens when the dream falls apart,” 2024 (oil, acrylic, imitation gold leaf on canvas, 48 x 48 inches / 121.9 x 121.9 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
Installation view of “Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears,” James Cohan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, New York, N.Y. (May 3-June 15, 2024). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
JERRELL GIBBS, “All we’re left with are peace lilies, teddy bears and a balloo,” 2024 (72 1/2 x 72 1/4 inches / 184.2 x 183.5 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
Installation view of “Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears,” James Cohan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, New York, N.Y. (May 3-June 15, 2024). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
JERRELL GIBBS, “Longing,” 2024 (oil on canvas, 68 x 72 / 172.7 x 182.9 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
JERRELL GIBBS, “Like father like son,” 2024 (oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches / 101.6 x 76.2 cm). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
Installation view of “Jerrell Gibbs: Language of Tears,” James Cohan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, New York, N.Y. (May 3-June 15, 2024). | © Jerrell Gibbs 2024. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle
BOOKSHELF
A new publication will accompany the first solo museum exhibition of Jerrell Gibbs opening in September 2025 at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pa. The volume will include a scholarly essay by guest curator, writer, and art historian Angela N. Carroll and interviews with Gibbs conducted by Jessica Bell Brown, curator and department head of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and independent curator Larry Ossei-Mensah. Also consider recent volumes focused on figurative painting, including “Reframing the Black Figure: An Introduction to Contemporary Black Figuration,” “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” and “Unrealism: New Figurative Painting.”
