Chantal Gibson

Teaching & research interests

• Art, decolonization, social activism in the Canadian cultural landscape
• Technologies of literacy and the overlap between literary and visual art
• Teaching thru art: every semiotics and the representation of identity

Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Recipient of the 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship and the 2016 SFU Excellence in Teaching Award, Chantal has been a member of the SFU community since 2002. She teaches written and visual communication courses in the School of Interactive Art & Technology (SIAT).

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 at the ROM, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Open Space Victoria, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology, and the Senate of Canada.

Her debut book of poetry, 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 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow-up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021) brings a critical lens to the representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media.

Artist Website: chantalgibson.com

• Historical In(ter)ventions in Human Capital, Contemporary Calgary, October 20, 2022 to January 29, 2023 and Confederation Centre Art Gallery, from June 2023 to October 2023.
• Studies in Erasure (altered texts) in The Chorus is Speaking, Campbell River Art Gallery, June 4 to August 20, 2022
• “… yet there is all this” (2021) in Thresholds. A digital project commissioned as part of A Map to the Door of No Return at 20: A Gathering, York University, November 3-6, 2021 https://www.thresholdsproject.com
• Sankofa. Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver. November 4, 2021 to March 27, 2022.
• Tyranny. Permanent collection exhibition. Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax. July 2021—
• Honouring Black Canadian Artists, Senate of Canada. Curator: Sen. P. Bovey. September 2020 – June 2021.