Downbeat

Art

HCC Permanent Art Collection

Downbeat

Name/Title

Downbeat

Entry/Object ID

2017.5.1

Description

Two vertical black and white etched artworks with an eyeball in the center of both works. Both have dramatic bubble wording and comic effects around each eyeball.

Collection

HCC Permanent Art Collection

Made/Created

Artist Information

Artist

Mark Thomas Gibson

Role

Artist

Date made

2017

Exhibitions

HCC Permanent Art Collection, Coll. Manager.

HCC Permanent Art Collection

Interpretative Labels

Label Type

Object Label

Label

Mark Thomas Gibson’s diptych Downbeat is drawn from a scene in his artist book, Early Retirement. Published in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the then-looming 2016 fall election, Gibson’s book and accompanying artworks imagine dystopian scenes of upheaval in parallel with the national and global upheavals of our time. Gibson’s personal lens on American culture stems from his viewpoint as an artist, a black male, a professor at Yale, an American history buff, and comic book nerd. All this fuels his exploration of American culture through the high and low visual languages of painting and comics to reveal a narrative that spells out our fabricated destruction.