AN ARTIST EXAMINES CERTAIN SOCIAL CONDITIONS CREATIVELY — AND WITH CANDOR — FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

by Edward M. Gómez

For all its color, cleverness, imagination, and humor, the more one gets to know Linda Sibio’s work and the thinking that informs it, the more it becomes clear that both the artist and her creations might be best described as fearless.

brutjournal readers first met Sibio and learned about her background and ideas in the magazine’s September 2022 issue. At that time, we observed, “It’s fair to say that the genesis of all of this seemingly unsinkable art-maker’s activity lies deep in a reservoir of pain, fear, darkness, and hardship, all of which, miraculously, she has managed to transform into expressions of humanity and self-awareness.”

Our earlier article stated, “In the best senses of the word, Sibio is a survivor, someone who has had to pick herself up, pull up her socks, and keep putting one foot in front of the other with concentration and resolve more times than most people would be able to count. Her motto very well could be that definitive existentialist bon mot from the end of the modern Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable (1953): ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”