Mark Thomas Gibson

Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013. He is represented by M+B in Los Angeles and Loyal in Stockholm. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Pilchuck Glass School. His past honors include a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (Philadelphia, PA), a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

Gibson’s personal lens on American culture stems from his multifaceted viewpoint as an artist—as a black male, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through languages of drawing, painting, print, and sculpture revealing a vision of a satirical, dystopian America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story.

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Every Monday, Olson Kundig starts the week with an all‑office meeting, and once a month this meeting is devoted to an outside guest speaker. The Olson Kundig Speaker Series was created by Alan Maskin over two decades ago with the goal of inspiring staff with presentations from people who work outside the realm of architecture. To date, more than 300 guests have come to speak in our offices. The forum is also available for internal speakers, who share completed project overviews, complex project details, and research findings, all with the aim of increasing our shared knowledge.

The theme of the 2025 Speaker Series is Multitudes. In an age where differing views and beliefs often estrange and divide us, it is worth noting that life itself is composed of contradiction, inconsistency, and surprise. We ourselves are no strangers to the dualities within. Multitudes explores stories from our human epoch that reveal the beauty of unexpected unions—how unrelated and seemingly opposing forces can collide to create something wonderful.