Gabrielle Ione Hickmon (b. 1994) is a Black woman from a middle place—Ypsilanti, MI. Her lab is a place where clay, textiles, and film photography meet. She is interested in body memory, waiting rooms, placekeeping, circles, the African American Midwest, ecomemory, jazz, and ocular proof.

Gabrielle’s work is engaged in a series of calls and responses to the world around her, especially the worlds of the upper Midwest, where she is from and where her family has lived since 1870. Gabrielle’s personal history in the region animates her visual art and research practice as she is currently a first-year doctoral student in History at the University of Michigan, focusing on the African American family in the Great Lakes Region from the 1800s to the present. Her practice is concerned with African American Midwestern histories, presents, and futures taking shape beyond major urban centers and dominant cultural narratives about African American history in the Midwest.

As a breast cancer survivor, Gabrielle’s practice also engages illness, disability, and health toward an attempt at clarifying her experience to herself and exploring cancer's intersections with history and culture. She is concerned with breast cancer, its aftermaths, and its impacts—especially on Black women. 

Gabrielle won Bronze in the Leisure, Games, & Sport category of the 2022 Information is Beautiful Awards and First Honorable Mention in the 2022 NYU American Journalism Online Awards for her ethnographic research project, How You Play Spades is How You Play Life: Spades in the African American Community. Her writing has appeared in Vox, Condé Nast Traveler, The Baffler, The Pudding, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She has exhibited work at the Ann Arbor Art Center’s Aquarium Gallery (Ann Arbor, MI), Life and Death Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa), The Visual Arts Center of Richmond (Richmond, VA). Her work is in the North Carolina State Historic Sites and Properties permanent collection.

Gabrielle has been an artist-in-residence at Pocoapoco, Mas Palou, Mudhouse, John Bauer Ceramics, the Visual Art Center of Richmond, and the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation. She will soon be in residence at The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. In 2023, Gabrielle was awarded a fellowship to Haystack Mountain’s 5th Summer Session in Ceramics to study smoke-firing under Madoda Fani. Gabrielle lives, works, and studies in her hometown, Ypsilanti, MI.