The Brandywine Museum of Art museum is getting a $300,000 grant to support its programming.
The grant money from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage will go toward the museum’s planned exhibition of work by Baltimore-based artist Jerrell Gibbs. Jerrell Gibbs: No Solace in the Shade is set to open in September 2025, featuring more than 30 of Gibbs’ paintings from public and private collections.
The museum’s Senior Curator, Amanda Burdan, describes Gibbs’ work.
“He really wants to, especially in this selection from his body of work, highlight the complications of black masculinity in America today," Burdan said.
Among the works featured will be portraits of men Gibbs admires, like the late Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings and playwright August Wilson.
Burdan says that despite Gibbs’ relative youth - he was born in 1988 - his work has already made a mark on the art world.
“He has with his figurative painting, really caused a a bit of a stir," she said. "It's on one hand, traditional. It's going back to the traditions of figure painting, but it's applying those traditions to a subject we have not been really familiar with in traditional figurative painting.”
The exhibition is guest-curated by art historian and professor Angela Carroll.
Delaware Public Media's arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
