Love Made Visible

Book excerpt: A TOUCHING MEMOIR OF ART AND MARRIAGE IN BOSTON’S VIBRANT SOUTH END In Love Made Visible, Jean Gibran portrays her role as spouse of a gifted artist and their often stormy family life together in Boston’s diverse South End. In the process, she vividly recalls to life the prolific Boston Expressionist art scene to which the South End was home. Retracing the course of her fifty-year marriage to sculptor Kahlil Gibran, cousin of the noted poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran, she reflects on the trials and joys of defying conventions of the 1950s, embracing another culture, raising a child in the household of a driven artist, and enabling her husband’s passion for sculpture and craft. Like her “mostly happy marriage,” and the fiercely local and independent artistic movement to which she pays homage, Gibran’s moving, idiosyncratic memoir finds its own form as she confronts the costs—and reaffirms the value—of creative commitment, in art and in life. Accompanying the memoir are a summary of the sculptor Gibran’s work, brief biographical sketches of many mid-twentieth-century artists and personalities who populated Boston and Provincetown, and commentaries by art historian Charles Giuliani of Berkshire Fine Arts and museum director and curator Katherine French of the Danforth Museum of Art.