Professor Gibson writes on Modern and Contemporary art and is best known for her work on Abstract Expressionism. She holds an M.A. in Ceramics from Kent State University and taught studio art for ten years before beginning her M.A. in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh, where she received the Distinguished Alumna Award for 1995. She received her Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Delaware and has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Yale University, the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and UCLA, and has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, and the Getty Research Institute.
Interested in the interaction of vision and language in the production of culture and identity, Gibson meshes ideas from fields such as literature, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy with close examination of popular culture as well as works of art to look at how art affects culture and how culture is reflected in art. She specializes in art after World War II, teaching courses in Semiotics, Abstraction, Allegory, Cross-Cultural Art, Pop Art, Minimalism, Feminist Theory and Contemporary Women's Art, and Postmodernism.
Gibson is the author of Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (1990) and Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997). She co-curated Judith Godwin, Style and Grace for the Museum of West Virginia (1997) and Norman Lewis: The Black Paintings, 1946-1977, at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1998). She has written catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Kenkeleba Gallery and the New Museum, and the Kunstmuseum Basel. With Stephen Polcari she guest-edited an issue of the Art Journal, and her articles have appeared in journals such as Studio International, Kunstforum, The International Review of African American Art, Artforum, American Art, Genders, The Journal of Homosexuality, Yale Journal of Criticism, Arts Magazine, and Third Text, and anthologies published by the University of Chicago, Cambridge University Press, Harper Collins, and the University of Liverpool Press.
