Bio

“Gibson-Cornell is a wanderer who explores cities in an effort to recover their “urban skin." When an image catches his eye, he rips it off the wall and takes it home. Back at his studio … he arduously turns that would-be trash into stunning artwork. Gibson-Cornell slices the salvaged posters into strips and weaves them together into vibrant collages that can reach ten feet across. With some pieces, a central image like a face or a hand is still decipherable, but it’s been distorted as though through a kaleidoscopic filter. Others are so abstract, with various different posters so obscured or mixed together, that they bring to mind an unfamiliar topographic map. Using recycled found posters as his core material, this printmaker-turned-weaver builds colorful scenes that reference his travels, the imperfections of memory and the language of street-level visual culture.”
-RJ Rushmore (Art for Change: The Wandering Weaver), the Philadelphia Citizen. Dec 20 2023.

Galen Gibson-Cornell was born and raised in Maryville, Missouri, in a family of classical musicians. In his art practice he demonstrates a professional and cultural fascination with cities, focusing on creative projects in Berlin, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Plovdiv, Bulgaria; Venice, Italy; and Novi Sad, Serbia, among others.

In 2013 Gibson-Cornell finished his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin, and for the academic year 2013-14 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Budapest, Hungary, where he was a scholar at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. His work there was formative for his exploration into street-posters and other urban ephemera, as he focused on creating artworks using political campaign posters as subject matter.

Since 2017 Gibson-Cornell has lived and worked in Philadelphia. Galen’s work is currently represented by Bertrand Productions Gallery in Philadelphia and TW Fine Art in West Palm Beach and New York City.

His work has exhibited across the United States and internationally, most notably featured in the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Poster House Museum (NYC), and the U.S. Embassy to the Republic of Togo. His work is in several notable collections, including 21C Museum Hotels, Microsoft, and the University of Texas Medical center.