Visual artist Mark Thomas Gibson (he/his) chronicles race, class, and contemporary American culture with a historian’s eye on the past. His paintings, collages, prints, caricatures, graphic novels, and other works explore the potential of narrative art to provoke examinations of power structures and racism and to foster empathy. Gibson says he uses elements of caricature and the comic form “to mock and invert power relations” in works that reflect and record a shared understanding of contemporary political and social events. He has released two artist’s books: Early Retirement (2017), featuring over 200 pen-and-ink drawings, and Some Monsters Loom Large (2016). Gibson has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. He teaches painting at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and he earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
