Category: Art History
In Memoriam: Ann Eden Gibson
December 18, 2025 Written by Department of Art History Staff | Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson and courtesy of art history
The Department of Art History remembers former chair who made lasting contributions to the field
The University of Delaware’s Department of Art History is mourning the loss of Professor Emerita Ann Eden Gibson, who died on Oct. 9, 2025 in Tucson, Arizona. Gibson was a central presence in the Department of Art History for decades, serving as chair from 1998 to 2003, and as a professor in the Department until her retirement in 2010. Her research on contemporary art was groundbreaking; she championed the stories of Black artists, women and other artists often overlooked. With her passing, the University of Delaware and the field of art history have lost an irreplaceable voice.
Dr. Gibson was born April 30, 1944, in Hagerstown, Maryland. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art education and a master’s in ceramics at Kent State University and had a career as a studio art instructor before receiving a master’s degree in art history from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1984, she completed a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, advised by art history’s founding chair, William I. Homer, was “Theory Undeclared: Avant-Garde Magazines as a Guide to Abstract Expressionist Images and Ideas.” Dr. Gibson’s accomplished teaching career included roles at Yale, the University of Pittsburgh, the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1998, she returned to UD to serve as chair of the Department of Art History. She was named professor emerita after her retirement in 2010.
Among her many publications, Dr. Gibson’s most notable book is Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Her project was a departure from the established art historical scholarship on the Abstract Expressionist movement. As Dr. Gibson argued, the story of Abstract Expressionism from its beginning had focused on a small group of straight white men, at the expense of important artists of color, women artists and queer artists who had made enormous contributions to the movement but whose accomplishments had been overlooked. Dr. Gibson’s book has had a significant and continued impact on the field; in 2012, 15 years after its initial publication, it won the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center Book Prize, an honor reserved for books that had a significant contribution in shaping current thinking about the arts that did not necessarily receive recognition at the time of publication. The award was based on the book’s excellence, originality, quality of writing and scholarship, contribution to knowledge, and significance to the field of American Modernism.
Dr. Gibson’s other publications include Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), journal articles and contributions to many books and exhibition catalogs. Among her curated exhibitions were Norman Lewis, The Black Paintings, 1945-1977 (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1998) and Judith Godwin: Style and Grace (Art Museum of Western Virginia, 1997). Dr. Gibson also received numerous awards throughout her career, including a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 in addition to support from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery and the Getty Research Institute.
Special Collections in Morris Library is now the home of the Ann Eden Gibson Papers, which comprise materials collected by Dr. Gibson during her career as an art historian. The collection includes artist files (mostly of artists working from 1940 to 2008), audio recordings of Dr. Gibson’s interviews with artists and talks by art historians, and slides that contain photographs of art objects, some taken by Dr. Gibson herself. When she offered the papers to Special Collections in 2016, Dr. Gibson noted that many of the artist interviews were unpublished. The Gibson Papers are available for research access in Special Collections.
While preparing for her retirement from the Department of Art History in 2009, Gibson wrote: “Not everyone is lucky enough to have a home that they actually want to go back to. Probably even fewer are offered the opportunity to return to it. But the University of Delaware, my alma mater, actually did invite me back after 17 years away. I decided to come, not out of sense of duty, but for the sheer pleasure of rejoining the most cordial and supportive group of academics I knew.” Ann Gibson will be dearly missed by all who were impacted by her scholarship and service. The UD Department of Art History joins her loved ones and the field of art history in mourning her loss and celebrating her remarkable life.
Read her obituary at Sensible Funerals & Cremation.
