The Voyage is Miami-born artist Mark Thomas Gibson’s homecoming. The paintings in the exhibition depict the artist’s journey of return over perilous seas. Is a return “home” possible, Gibson s e ems t o a s k , a f t e r a n extended period of time, when both journeyer and destination have changed? The question gathers urgency in our current political moment of historical nostalgia. There is no “going back” unchanged. History is not a light traveler: it accumulates baggage, psychological and material, as it goes along. We travel with the memory of where we’ve been, the bounty and the horror. The buried pun in the title Returns on a Homeward Tide poses the question: what are the returns on return? What are the gains or losses accrued?
Gibson draws on a vast sea of literary, art historical, and philosophical sources, including Homer’s Odyssey, Théodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819), Robert Colescott’s Wreckage of the Medusa (1978), Philip Guston’s Conspirators (c.1930), and the philosophical paradox of “the ship of Theseus.” Jerking into motion with a perceptual double-take, the narrative begins with two ships, one wrecked, one whole. The first journey is over before it can begin; the second unfurls in an extended train of six smaller canvases, revealing between them inflatable life rafts loaded up with the arcana of history and memory. This ship is a self-portrait of the artist “returning on a homeward tide,” moving forward while staying grounded.
“The sea is history,” as St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott reminds us in his poem of that name. The movement of the ocean, with its back-and-forth and rise and fall, opens out into a theory of history and historical change that resists the linear progression of past-present-future and imagines instead a fluid continuum moving in a “tidalectic” manner. In Gibson’s imaginary, complex new entities—people, persuasions, ideas—coalesce on the surface of these waters. Collected in a string of inflatable life rafts, all tugged along by the ship in Returns, these resurfacing historical elements include: Saboteurs, Conspirators, Justice, Bounty, The Universe, and Lovers.
(b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. Mark Thomas Gibson’s personal lens on American culture stems from his multipartite viewpoint as an artist, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through the language of painting and drawing, revealing a vision of America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story.
Gibson co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo. The show examined evolving perspectives of Black identity in American culture and history from 1912 to 2016 through printed media and artworks. Gibson has published two books, Some Monsters Loom Large and Early Retirement. Gibson has been awarded the Pew Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant and the Chiaro Award. His most recent museum solo exhibition, Overture, premiered at the Berman Museum of Art in Collegeville, PA January 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). Gibson co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo. The show examined evolving perspectives of Black identity in American culture and history from 1912 to 2016 through printed media and artworks. Gibson has published two books, Some Monsters Loom Large and Early Retirement. Gibson has been awarded the Pew Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant and the Chiaro Award. His most recent museum solo exhibition, Overture, premiered at the Berman Museum of Art in Collegeville, PA January 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). Gibson’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Beth Rudin Dewoody Collection, West Palm Beach, FL, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, The West Collection at SEI, Oaks, PA, Peggy Cooper Cafritz Collection, Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, New Haven, CT, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO and Hillsborough Community College, Tampa, FL He is represented by Loyal, (Stockholm, Sweden). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts New Brunswick, NJ.He is represented by Loyal, (Stockholm, Sweden). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts New Brunswick, NJ.
