With a career spanning 60 years, James Gibson was a revered Tennessee teacher and sculptor. Today, over 240 sculptures from his estate are available to collectors for purchase.
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It’s hard to miss a sculpture by James Gibson, whose numerous and often massive works can be characterized by blocky abstracted, yet continuous forms, constructed in either wood or metal, sometimes both. Though Gibson is known for his extensive oeuvre of more than 600 sculptures, he also had a rich 60-year career as a college art professor in the American South.
Born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1937, Gibson earned a Master of Fine Art degree in sculpture from Ohio University in 1961 and, that same year, he began his teaching career at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. In 1963, he returned to West Virginia to join the Salem College faculty as head of the art department. Morris Harvey College then offered Gibson an opportunity to return to Charleston as a member of the art department faculty in the fall 1965. Gibson taught there for the next five years, while he worked on wood carvings, and welded sculpture.
During this time in West Virginia, Gibson’s work caught the attention of the Charleston Art Gallery at Sunrise, the first major art gallery to exhibit his work. Gibson also completed three notable commissions: a brass sculpture-fountain for the FMC Inorganic Chemical Company’s newly constructed open-air atrium garden in South Charleston in 1966, two large brass sculptures for permanent installation at the Morris Harvey College campus in 1967, and a brass sculpture for the entrance of the remodeled Lewis Chevrolet dealership in 1968.
That same year, in early 1968, Gibson met local businessman William Endres, who had enrolled in one of his art classes and later offered Gibson the key to his own metal shop facilities in Kanawha City to expand his sculptural materials from wood to include more work in metal. There, Gibson also refined his welding skills while working with many different metals.
Though Gibson’s early subject matter often centered around birds, his work in later years shifted focus to mythology, which became more prominent in the following decade.
In 1970, Gibson moved to develop a sculpture program for the art department at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). There, the extensive sculpture facilities at the college allowed Gibson to focus quite intensely on furthering his sculpture practice.
In his first few years, between 1970–74, the artist produced a whopping 70 new sculptures, with five major solo exhibitions in New York and Nashville that established Gibson’s reputation as an artist. Additionally, he won the competitive First American Bank sculpture commission in 1974 for a fountain at the new plaza in downtown Nashville.
This fruitfulness continued, with more than 70 works produced between 1975–79 for two solo exhibitions and two major commissions, including a welded brass fountain for Nashville’s Cheekwood Botanical Gardens in 1975 and an outdoor “portal” sculpture for the entrance of to the Huntington Galleries Bird Walk nature trail in West Virginia. The latter perhaps most acutely reflected such dominant motifs in Gibson’s midcareer work as female figures, birds, and metaphysical reflectors.
The rise in Gibson’s art career was directly tied to his success in the classroom. “If my teaching goes well, my sculpture goes well,” Gibson often remarked. This commitment to his craft did not go unnoticed, with a promotion by 1980 to a full-time professorship that recognized his ten years of excellence as an artist and a teacher.
Clara Hieronymus, the Art and Drama Critic for the Tennessean, characterized Gibson at the time as “the prototype of the ideal teacher artist. Which is to say that his own creative talents speak for what he is teaching his students; that he is both teacher and respected artist.”
That sentiment was captured in the subsequent decade from 1980–89 in the more than 120 sculptures Gibson made for 23 exhibitions and five commissions. Two exhibitions, one at the Nashville Botanical Gardens and Fine Arts Center of Cheekwood and another at the Cultural Center capitol complex in Charleston included metaphysical reflectors, writing machines, and portals.
“The word metaphysics simply means ‘beyond the chemical.’ When the Greeks got into things that were beyond the physical reality – things that could not be touched, tasted, seen, smelled, or heard – they called it metaphysical,” Gibson explained of the concept.
During the early ‘80s his work became more experimental, with sculptures that could also function as a table, for example. Gibson began questioning what art could be, finding a different kind of meaning in an object’s functionality: “a table may be made with the same kind of personal, subjective idea in mind that a piece of sculpture is, but it’s not going to be looked at in the same way.”
Continuing this momentum, some of Gibson’s larger sculptures found a stage at the 1982 World’s Fair in an expansive outdoor exhibition. Other outdoor sculpture exhibitions quickly followed at Walters State Community College, the University of Tennessee, and Cleveland State Community College.
All of these opportunities culminated into Gibson’s most significant commission of the period, Rites of Passage, the sculpture for MTSU’s 75th anniversary celebration in 1986. “The idea that went into my latest work Rites of Passage has been the major catalyst in my work lately. The idea of a cycle – birth, life, death. The human animal always looks for repetition, something to have faith in,” Gibson said of the work.
His final decade at MTSU included the creation of more than 90 sculptures, 20 exhibits, and five commissions, typically made from welded steel, brass, bronze, or aluminum, and a mixture of metals. In 1991 and 1996, his work was presented in two exhibitions at The Cumberland Gallery and continued to be featured in outdoor shows.
Gibson’s massive Big Table received the purchase award at the 1995–96 Sculpture Garden III Biennial Exhibit at Chattanooga State Technical Community College, while his WV Buffet sculpture was accepted in the 1995 fifth International Shoebox Sculpture Competition, where it is currently housed in the permanent collection at the University of Charleston. In 1997, his commissioned stainless-steel sculpture Reflection of Memories was realized and installed at the University of Charleston’s Clay Tower Building.
Gibson characterized his work at this time as “strongly influenced by my interest in sculptural form, mythology, and marker as a metaphor for a conspicuous object serving as a guide for travelers.”
Shortly thereafter, in 1999, Gibson retired after 29 years of teaching at MTSU. In 2000, the same school named Gibson professor emeritus. He was also inducted into the Alumni Gallery of Achievement by the University of Charleston and his work can be found in both private and public collections throughout the United States, as well as Turkey, Germany, and Austria.
In retirement, Gibson’s work shifted again from themes of spiritual passage and ferries, giving way to forms of grave markers and cairns. In 2003, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville purchased Mardis Marker for its permanent collection following an exhibition centered on Tennessee artists.
The last work Gibson made, titled 4:14 St. James Place, taken from a Bible verse, anticipated his own passage to death in 2017 at 81 years old.
Gibson left behind an indelible mark on his community, with a rich cultural legacy and a robust portfolio of more than 600 sculptures. Today, 240 of those works in his estate are available for purchase to collectors and gallerists.