Jerrell Gibbs paints memory at human scale. In his new exhibition, Jerrell Gibbs: No Solace in the Shade at the Brandywine Museum of Art, the Baltimore-born artist’s work unfolds across more than 30 large canvases—portraits of kin, neighbors, and anonymous ancestors rescued from photo albums. On view through March 1, 2026, the show marks Gibbs’s first solo museum exhibition and Brandywine’s first solo presentation of an emerging contemporary artist. It’s also accompanied by his debut monograph, a fuller record of an ascendant practice intent on restoring fullness and tenderness to Black life.
If American painting too often renders Black life peripheral or symbolic, Gibbs’ pictures insist on presence: a backyard line dance in “The Electric Slide” (2024), boys settling soil in “Boys Planting” (2021), a romance glimpsed through the plastic coils of a scrapbook in “Boy meets girl” (2023). His art features flowering trees, patterned interiors, and fabrics that pop. Through the artist’s brush, ordinary moments feel almost sacred.
Reaching this milestone was something that has been years in the making. “To be completely honest with you, I haven’t had the time to revel in it,” he says of the museum debut. “It’s been a long time coming—a lot of behind the scenes stuff had to get done.” The opening, he admits, was when the meaning landed. “ I know this is monumental. I’m blessed and highly favored; and this opportunity for me to do this at such a young point in my career.”
The title No Solace in the Shade, threads autobiography with lineage. Gibbs encountered the phrase while reading Open Water by British writer Caleb Azumah Nelson, whose reflections on Blackness, love, and fatherhood echoed Gibbs’s own story. His father was killed when he was seven, a loss that continues to shape the painter’s inquiry. “It really spoke to me on a personal level,” Gibbs says. “That quote, ‘no solace in the shade,’ made me think about my practice, and what it meant to really dive deep internally and basically regurgitate that through the art.” The lesson, as he tells it, is an ethic of honesty. “Why not just be yourself at the end of the day?” he says.
Gibbs, a father to two daughters, describes the way parenting redirected his gaze inward and, in turn, refined the work. “It’s sped up the necessity to look further within and not looking without,” he says. “You have a decision to be the best version of yourself or not. Being a father has challenged me to work on the things that I struggle with. I don’t want the same things that I struggle with to be a repeated cycle for my children.”
A three-part evolution underscores these paintings. First came graduate school at MICA, where he unearthed ten dust-caked family photo albums in his aunt’s basement and began translating those images to canvas—cookouts, living rooms, the texture of a household’s rhythm. Next, he became keenly aware of how Black people, and Black men in particular, were being depicted in wider culture, and he set out to counter those distortions with pictures of intimacy and care, and “surrounding them with beautiful accents like flowers,” as he puts it. The third phase materialized over the last year and a half, and delves deeper into origin.
“Over time it started to unfold like, ‘bro, you’re really chasing your past,’” he reflects. “There’s this constant mining of one’s history that continues to build the future.” Childhood, in Gibbs’s hands, is a universal American archive that invites viewers to locate their own beginnings.
Guest curator Angela N. Carroll has traveled with Gibbs for nearly a decade, from one of the first critical essays on his work to stewarding this museum debut. “Angela was the first person who critically wrote about my practice, and she was also the first person who was going to curate my first museum solo show,” he says. With her, no detail is left unturned.” If the exhibition restores everyday joy, it does so without ignoring grief. The canvases read like open windows, and the viewer is a welcomed guest.
“More than anything, I hope people see themselves,” Gibbs says. “All I want the work to do is to continue to create dialogue—an opportunity for people to be comfortable with talking about hard things, but also see the similarities and the differences that we all have.”
Jerrell Gibbs: No Solace in the Shade is on view now through March 1, 2026 at the Brandywine Museum of Art