Chantal Gibson Writer-Artist-Educator
@ chantalgibsonartist Vancouver BC
un/settled at SFU Downtown Nov. 2020 - Nov. 2021
Bio:
Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure.
Her visual art has been exhibited widely across Canada, in galleries and educational institutions including: Open Space Artist Centre, Victoria, University of Victoria, Vancouver Art Gallery, Calgary Art Gallery, MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan Galleries, the ROM, University of Toronto Museums, the Senate of Canada, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Confederation Gallery in Charlottetown.
She is the author of two poetry collections. Her debut book, How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019) explores the representation of Black women in Canadian history, art, literature. It won the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the prestigious 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021) explores the representation of blackness across digital media. Both works appear on secondary and post-secondary classroom reading lists.
A 2021 3M National Teaching Fellow, Gibson teaches writing and design communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
About Me
I am interested in challenging imperialist ideas 'quietly' embedded in everyday things. My critical art making and writing practices explore the cultural production and consumption of knowledge--always asking whose voices are included, whose are not?--undoing the myths, tropes and master narratives that circulate across the Canadian cultural imagination.
My arts-education workshops and speaking engagements encourage audiences and participants to question 'common knowledge' and consider the assumptions embedded in the cultural institutions where we work, learn and play.