BIOGRAPHY
Robyn Gibson is an emerging artist and curator living and working in Louisville, Kentucky. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Louisville in 2014, earning a BFA in Painting and a BSBA in Marketing. Since receiving her MFA in 2018 from the New York Academy of Art, Gibson has been developing her multidimensional art practice. In 2020 she completed a seven month residency at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. In 2021 she completed a six month virtual residency with the North Central Louisiana Arts Council and Ross Lynn Charitable Foundation, as well as a four month residency with BKLYN CLAY in Brooklyn, New York.
After she started boxing in 2016, Gibson began incorporating it into her art practice. Larger-than-life-sized bold, gestural charcoal figures on canvas, a lyrical writing style meant to pack a punch, and voluptuous vessels inspired by her own curves all convey the movement and force important to her work and inspired by her boxing practice. The act of taking up space and claiming ownership of it is important to her work. As a black artist focused on self-portraiture and the exploration of her own trauma, Gibson grapples with black identity, the depiction, perception and value of black bodies, and what it means to be authentic. Parallels and Peripheries: Practice and Presence, put together in 2021, was her first curatorial project and was sparked by the question, “How do we, as people of color, take ownership of our space?” She and curator Larry Ossei-Mensah worked with the New York Academy of Art to put together an exhibition to address this question.