Leah Ra'chel Gipson
Leah Ra’chel Gipson is a multidisciplinary artist whose professional training is in art therapy. Gipson is born in Florida and based in Chicago, occupied homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe Nations, and the Ho’Chunk, Meskwaki, Sauk, and Miami Nations.
Her art facilitates hyperlocal community projects that draw on Black culture and imagine critical “call and response” environments. She explores issues of race and gender through family history, popular media, and archives by creating work that uses video and film, sound, textile, and installation rooted in traditions of Black feminism and the Black church.
Gipson's work has been featured in Chicago at the South Side Community Art Center, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Project Row Houses (Houston, TX). She served on the Philadelphia Museum of Art advisory group for the 2022 exhibition, Elegy: Lament in the 20th Century, and is currently a member of the advisory group for the Chicago Arts & Health Pilot for Creative Workers. She is currently serving as an advisory committee member for a forthcoming exhibition on Jacon Lawrence's hospital series at the North Carolina Museum of Art, curated by Tanya Sheehan and Lauren Applebaum.
Profile caption: Woman with dark, curly hair and brown skin in front of a colorful quilt Profile image by: Photo Credit: Dwayne Young
16mm frame of two young brown skinned girls standing at the edge of a pond in a grassy field
Video Credit: Joel Wanek
Featured Artworks
She Asked Her Mother…, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX
She Asked Her Mother...at Project Row Houses
Black Girlhood Altar installation as part of She Asked Her Mother...at Project Row Houses
Mixed media installation, 2022. This installation explored sacred spaces between Black daughters, mothers, and “othermothers” that create possibilities for freedom while living in the South, a meditation on spaces and rituals that Black girls invent when no other possibilities exist. Referencing a collection of family photos, my mother’s piano, and piano from my family in Houston, the work celebrates intergenerational spiritual care practices and the curiosities of Black girls. The installation featured an iteration of The Black Girlhood Altar, a multimedia, artifact-based, video, and object-based artwork I co-created with collaborators Scheherazade Tillet and Robert Narcisso.
She Asked Her Mother…, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX
Exterior image of She Asked Her Mother... installation at Project Row Houses
Leah Ra'chel Gipson has crowd-funded a project with 3AP
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- $9,348 raised of $6,000 goal
- 0 Days 0:00:00 LEFT
Staring at the Dark is a socially engaged documentary film and community project about Black ancestral and contemporary landscapes in the age of environmental catastrophe. Incorporating oral histories, digital projections, and sculptural installations of rebuilt sites now lost, this project …
Read more about Staring at the Dark