Interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator Jan Gilbert mines memory, loss and transition. She pushes boundaries of all sorts by forging objects, installations, rituals and networks. Her universally compelling works are simultaneously personal and collective, public and private, local and global.

Scale and scope range from an intimate bookwork tribute using her youthful correspondence with a Vietnam War soldier, Memorial to Bobby (1991), to the 300 foot long Biography of a House(2007), a ribbon of embalmed family photos encircling her mother’s flooded post-Katrina home and a part of the acclaimed LakeviewS Sunset Bus Tour.

Her works have been shown widely in galleries, museums, and cultural centers across the United States and abroad; but early in her career, when the 1984 World’s Fair came to New Orleans, Gilbert realized her strong need to step outside of the gallery walls and engage more directly with a public that wouldn’t be inclined to visit sanctioned and safe art spaces. Her public art has tackled tough issues of AIDS, breast cancer, war and death, as it regularly finds its way to city streets across the globe. A few such projects, often collaborative, include: The Subject is War (1991), using bus shelters; Borders, Boundaries & Bindings, commissioned to appear as one of the first Central Artery Projects of Boston’s Big Dig in the streets of the South End (1993); Lunch EnCounter(2004), an installation and performance on desegregation; On the Line/Sur la ligne (2010), installed at 571 Projects Gallery and on the High Line in the Chelsea Arts District of Manhattan; and 30 Years/30 Blocks: a retrospective installation of place and public art work (2012), which appeared both inside and out at The Front in New Orleans’ St. Claude Arts District.