Burn Victim Thanks Life-Saving UAB Healthcare Workers With Artwork

The remarkable story of Delrico Gibson would be impossible to believe if it hadn’t actually happened.

On February 29, 2020, just weeks after opening his family’s new restaurant in Clanton, AL, a gasoline explosion in the kitchen engulfed him in flames. Severe burns covered most of his body. Some were so catastrophic as to literally reshape the structure of his bones and fuse his fingers together.

Clinging to life, emergency medical responders drove him and his wife 50 miles north to UAB Hospital in Birmingham.

Gibson woke up from a medically induced coma 37 days later.

A chef by trade, Gibson (b. 1958; Detroit) had retired from Oakland and moved to Alabama. No one at the hospital yet knew he’d been making art for over 50 years. A particularly intricate style of art, “symmetric abstract design string art”–in his words–requiring considerable dexterity in the hands to complete.

Not to mention use of a hammer to pound the nails. Use of his fingers to tie knots. Use of a scissors to cut the excess material.

With the bones in his hands melted, would he ever make art again?

After saving his life, UAB medical staff next went to work on saving Gibson’s quality of life. After months of treatment, UAB surgeons, doctors, therapists, and caregivers, including his wife, have helped the artist regain enough of the function necessary to create his elaborately vivid designs.

He’ll never be the same. One of his arms has only 30% mobility. Surgeons fused it in that position after it melted in the fire. He will never bend his thumbs or index finger again. Several other procedures on his hands pending.

He compared himself to Humpty Dumpty, needing to be put back together again.

But he’s alive.

And creating.

And the subject of his first museum exhibition on view now through August 12, 2023, at UAB’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts (AEIVA). “Delrico Gibson: Strings of Gratitude” literally weaves together a story of survival and the artist’s deep appreciation for the health care professionals who saved his life. Composed primarily of repurposed wood, nails and wound yarn, each work on display represents a person who played a vital role in his recovery. In some cases, Gibson had to read through his medical records and rely on the testimony of his wife and son to recall the weeks after the accident and identify the people who helped him survive.

AEIVA employees became aware of Gibson’s remarkable story and artmaking after being tipped off to both by UAB public relations specialist Shannon Thomason.

“My team and I went and listened to his story and watched him hammer away on one of his pieces which often incorporates reclaimed wood and nails,” John Fields, The Lydia Cheney and Jim Sokol Endowed Director of UAB’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, told Forbes. “We were so taken with Mr. Gibson’s story and work, it was a pretty easy decision to offer him an exhibition at AEIVA.”

Works on display will include those dedicated to plastic surgeon René Pierre Myers, an assistant professor in the UAB Heersink School of Medicine’s Division of Plastic Surgery, who operated on Gibson’s hands, and James Hwang, director of UAB Medicine’s Burn Center, who used skin from Gibson’s thighs as a graft for his arms, hands and fingers. Gibson also created works for the first responders from the day of the accident, and the doctors in the UAB School of Dentistry who helped him with devices to gradually increase the opening of his mouth after it healed.

Artworks honoring UAB staff will be gifted by the artist to the staff members following the exhibition.

“Each picture was made specifically for its intended recipient,” Gibson told Forbes. “Each picture has heartfelt meaning.”

Again, if it weren’t true, you’d never believe it.

“An artist with no formal training, an innate, but sophisticated understanding of formal artistic considerations such as color theory and composition, and even though he is virtually unknown as a visual artist, Delrico has seemingly been compelled to make these works of art his entire life,” Fields said. “This is already incredibly compelling to me as a curator, but when you learn the story of his accident and survival, the story becomes so remarkable and unique. It stops being about art and becomes a story of our own humanity.”

But it is a story about art, too, and the influence of art on humanity. No one denies Gibson’s craving to create again as a contributing factor in his survival and recovery.

“Arts in medicine programs are becoming widespread among university hospitals, UAB happens to have such a program and its tremendous,” Fields explains. “I don’t claim to be an expert in this area, but from my perspective, everyone I’ve talked to who is connected to Delrico’s recovery journey, the general consensus is that he should be dead. In my conversations with Mr. Gibson over the past two years, it has become clear to me that his desire to regain the use of his hands for the purpose of creating his artworks was a driving force in his healing. In a way, Delrico’s work is the physical manifestation of human resilience and determination.”

“Strings of Gratitude” is free and open to the public.