We Are Enough

An Interview with Jerrell Gibbs by Beverly Ailisha Price

JERRELL GIBBS PAINTS with a passion for daily life, for gesture, and for paint itself. He creates vibrant and expressive portraits, often adapting them from snapshots taken of family members and friends in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was born in 1988, and where he still lives. Gibbs began painting seriously only seven years ago yet has quickly developed a striking style of portraiture—a style that honors and celebrates the quotidien in African-American life. In his time studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he earned his MFA in 2020, he developed a body of work that caught the eye of Mariane Ibrahim, whose gallery in Chicago will open his first solo exhibition in September 2021. His work has appeared in the Reginald F. Lewis Museum (Baltimore) and The Gallery at Howard University, and is in the permanent collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Amid preparations for the upcoming show in Chicago, Gibbs took time out from his studio to speak virtually about his practice with Washington D.C. photographer and Full Bleed associate editor Beverly Ailisha Price.

Beverly Ailisha Price:
How did you start painting?

Jerrell Gibbs:

I started in 2014/2015, and initially I was sketching and drawing. I used to do that as a kid; I kind of stopped the older I got. Then I went back to it while I was at work one night; I started drawing and sketching again. That following year, my wife bought me an easel and some painting supplies as a Father's Day gift. I picked up the paintbrush on Father's Day in 2015, I think, and I haven't put it down since.

I remember you telling me that story, and how much I was compelled by it. I appreciate when men respect the women who help them out. Absolutely.

What inspires you to paint? I remember you saying you often work from family photos. What is it about such images that attracts your eye?

It's typically more from an image that I see—whatever catches my eye and makes me think about a lived experience. Sometimes it's stuff I see while I'm
out, but typically photographs are the launch pad for my ideas. I look through photo albums and pictures I already have. I'll find something that resonates with an emotion or feeling or something very particular, a gesture. Usually, it is centered around something I'm going through at the time or what I'm feeling or where I'm at as a painter. I'll select an image and then generate an idea about what this person is doing or what they're feeling. Then I run with that emotion or initial idea.

What themes do you pursue in your work?
When I did my first series, back in 2015/2016, it was about what I was feeling at that time and what we were going through as a city.
It was after Freddie Gray was murdered. It's always a representation of me and my people and what we're going through as a city. And what I mean by ‘my people’ is my family, friends, and close people. Because I don't want to act as if I speak for everybody in the Black community or all people of color. I don't speak for everybody. The first series I did was like a soundboard for how I felt at that time, about injustice and being a Black man in America and Baltimore City, to be more specific. Now my work has transformed into me wanting to document these lived experiences that are more celebratory and show our mundane, day-to-day activities. Those activities are just as important, and they solidify who we are as a people. It makes us appreciate the value of what we have in our day-to-day lives because we are enough.

What does your work aim to say?

Truth—that's it. That's all I want to do, is talk about the truth.

I see you with your daughter. That’s a sacred relationship. Absolutely, that’s all I’m looking to do.

What role does your art have in society?
This question circles back to other answers. I want to document the mundane and capture that regular, day-to-day life. I feel like we overshadow that because we're focused on the upper echelon or what it looks like on the exterior to be successful. We allow social media and television to dictate what's important or what we hold as valuable. There’s nothing wrong with that, I'm not against it, and I'm not fighting that; I'm just saying there’s nothing wrong with being at home and eating dinner with the family either. There's nothing wrong with just sitting on the couch and having a conversation, and those are the types of things that I’m interested in talking about and showing right now. I think about the people I'm documenting, and when I'm looking through those photo albums, they're photos of my aunt's generation. I found the photo albums in her basement, so I grabbed them, but those photos are of us as kids because they took those pictures, right? And I'm thinking to myself as I'm looking, ‘Yo, these people raised me!’ She documented these joyous occasions that we spent with each other, and that's so important. That's so valuable. Those pictures were my inheritance from her.

Of those that you've done, what's your favorite work? I know that's difficult to answer, but which one speaks to you the most? What piece touches you the most emotionally?

That's tough. I think it's called Turner. I think I came to tears either when I was working on it or when I finished it. My gallerist owns that piece; that was a big piece for me. I think it was the most emotional I ever got while working on something. It was almost as if I could picture myself being that person, that guy that I was painting.

I remember being in your studio, and your work is very emotional. You can't go and do it unless you feel it. Was it the color, or what was it for you with this work?

It was like I understood what he felt like. It was like he was sitting in a chair, and he just looked exhausted. It was the way he had his hand.

Is there an element of art you enjoy working with the most?
Yeah, the materiality of the paint. I get excited about oil paint, the texture, and what you can do with the medium. What it means to use paint and apply it to canvas, I'm really into that. It evolves into an abstract way of thinking because oil paint can take on a life of its own. Once you put that oil paint on a canvas and you let it sit, it starts to transform; it doesn't stay where it was when you left it. I enjoy that; I'm excited about manipulating paint and having a conversation with it. It’s not just the representation of a figure but also how you can create different relationships with paint—how it can have its own narrative and dialogue.

You said you started out sketching. What got you thinking about paint’s materiality?
Graduate school. Graduate school transformed my way of thinking. Professor Joan Waltemath and Stephen Ellis helped me understand what it meant to be a painter, not being an illustrator or being the best copier. Not to be negative in any way, but some people focus on realism or what something exactly looks like, and that's not what I'm interested in. I think they helped me determine what side of the spectrum I wanted to be on. I realized that painting is more than making a representation of something or someone. It's that, and it's something else. Paint is paint, and it has its own forms. That's the biggest thing for me.

How has your practice changed over time?
The evolution of understanding the oil paint's materiality, of the medium that I use. The stories are the same. Even before I got to graduate school, everything was always centered around my immediate family, friends, and close people. And the stories are still the same, but the level of understanding as far as what it means to be a painter is the only thing that changed.

Yes, it's something old and something new. And that's what I like about your work because when I see it, it doesn't look like something you're copying, but it does look like something that's been influenced, as we all are. Who do you think you're in a conversation with? What is one artist that, when you see their work, you are inspired by?

I love Henri Matisse, Noah Davis, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Velázquez, John Singer Sargent. The list goes on and on. I love painters who paint...like Jennifer Packer; she's a contemporary artist. And we're not on the same level; her work is way beyond me in light-years, her work is phenomenal. Noah Davis passed in 2015, I believe, but his work is about painterly relationships, brush strokes, etc.

How has your work adapted to the times of COVID? Have you felt isolated at all? And if so, what has the isolation done for you?
Yeah, definitely isolated. Our people adapt though. It's in our DNA, we're resourceful, and we adapt, so it is what it is. In particular, during COVID times, I went a little deeper. I'm always painting, but this time allowed me to look into what I was painting. It began with me locating these images and painting them because I could relate to something that I felt; it was never about directly copying the photo. But I kept asking myself, what is specific to this person making you want to paint them? So if it's a gesture, what about the gesture that makes it powerful? I began asking new questions, which forced my work to grow. Now I'm thinking about the sensuality of painting, and I'm thinking about the sensual experience that I want the viewer to have. I want the viewer to understand the emotion I'm getting from the photo. I want that to be present in my work through how it's painted and the way the oil paint is used.

What would you want your legacy to be known as?
All I'm looking for is truth. I want my work to be among the greatest in history and circulating through museums. I want my great-grandchildren and their children to see my work in these institutions so that they can see themselves in these spaces. So that they can envision themselves doing things that weren't common before their time. It changes with each generation. I didn't know anything about being an artist or painting for a living. But the reality of
it now is that's her (my daughter's) reality. She grew up with an African-American president. I just want the generations coming up under us to see us living in a different reality, a different light. I just really want to be up there with the greatest, and to keep working hard to get to that point.

Jerrell Gibbs graduated with an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, in 2020. He has exhibited at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, The Galleries at CCBC and Gallery of Art at Howard University. His work is in the permanent collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, CC Foundation, X Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gibbs is represented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.

Beverly Ailisha Price is a photographer focused on preserving the culture and stories of disenfranchised communities in Washington D.C., where she was born and raised.