Brandywine Museum of Art presents Jerrell Gibbs: No Solace in the Shade

Gibbs (b. 1988) earned his MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, and in just the first decade of his artistic practice, he has become highly regarded and widely collected. The artist’s goal is that his work should engender an emotional response, and in this revelatory exhibition, he amply succeeds. Believing that everyone is worthy of a portrait, Gibbs elevates and celebrates everyday life, finding meaning and mastery in the quietest or most unprepossessing moments.

Work that demands a response from the viewer

Guest curated by Angela N. Carroll, No Solace in the Shade is a deep dive into the artist’s life and circle. Like Norman Rockwell, Gibbs explores the question of who constitutes an American, finding his answer in those all around him—family, friends, colleagues. But Gibbs and his subjects are Black Americans, and in painting after painting, the artist challenges the “near invisibility” of Black life in our culture not with confrontative realism but with sensitive and luminous scenes grounded in community.

Working in the figurative tradition from realism to Impressionism (and before and beyond), Gibbs creates colorful work both new and classical, abstract and figurative, and always requesting a response from the viewer. At the exhibition’s entrance is Boy Meets Girl, 2023, an en grisaille depiction of a photo in an album, a work that directly references the photographs that serve as the departure points for Gibbs’ work.

The exhibition includes intimate genre scenes that engagingly capture everyday events, like Boys Planting, 2021 and Gone Fishn’, 2023, a work that gently evokes Winslow Homer. There are also large paintings, like Man with Lilacs, 2021 (4’ x 5’), where the subject against a Matisse-like background is holding a bouquet that you can almost smell, and Top Shelf, 2020 (6’ x 5’), portraying a nattily attired mixologist making drinks.

Four paintings are from the artist’s “Salvador” series, each named after a musical note, moody works different from the others. In a scrapbook, Gibbs found an image of an anonymous youngster, and the unknown photographic presence (whom he named Salvador) spoke strongly to him. For this ongoing and expanding portraiture series, he places the boy in different surroundings, a way of exploring different aspects of himself.

At the exhibition’s opening, the artist told a story about Too Soon, 2019. Its two panels are not the same size, the result of Gibbs’s decision to change from a small format to working in larger scale. A collector saw the paintings’ similarities and acquired them to be displayed as a diptych, something that Gibbs called his “beautiful mistake”.

Simplicity and intensity

No Solace in the Shade is hung very simply, an excellent design choice that allows the paintings to speak clearly. There are several “rooms”—nooks painted in a restful sky-blue color—that give the viewer a visual pause and allow time for reflection. One of them contains the exhibition’s signature image, another large work titled For Thomas, 2021. (All Gibbs’s works include the year as part of his titles.) On loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art, it also nods to Matisse, with its subject Baltimore poet Kondwani Fidel reclining in a field of flowers.

The exhibition is filled with striking works, but if there’s a highlight, it’s the monumental Nous visited the Seine, but did not swim, 2022. This 6’ x 6’ work is one of a series Gibbs created during the summer of 2022, when he lived in Paris. He was working to reinterpret the French Impressionists, seeking to position himself alongside the canon of artists who painted that iconic river. While water appears in many works, here it is magnified and glorified, in a stated homage to Manet, Monet, and Van Gogh. The painting pulses with intensity and drama, and the movement of the water and the light it reflects and refracts are stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful.

From the Seine to the Brandywine

Many of Gibbs’s works are in private or public collections, and it’s notable that in 2023, the Brandywine acquired Nous visited the Seine. Its acquisition was the impetus for No Solace in the Shade, Gibb’s first solo exhibition and also the museum’s first solo presentation of an emerging contemporary artist. QR codes next to selected works provide more information from the artist and others, and there is an accompanying full color illustrated catalogue.

The overall tone of the work may have something to do with a youthful inspiration. Early on, Gibbs says he was drawn to the character of Franklin in the Peanuts cartoons, a Black character always in the background. Franklin “became a sort of avatar” for him, grounding his work in a deceptive simplicity that holds vastly deeper meanings. The title of this exhibition, taken from the novel Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, is somewhat deceptive. No Solace in the Shade is actually brimming with beauty and solace, an expanding vision of America brought forward with sensitivity, love, and virtuosic craft.