McKibbin writes,
My work is shaped by living and working in the west.... I see myself as a kind of reporter, someone who documents, a witness to the mystery and beauty that surrounds us. My work faithfully records a sense of place and at the same time celebrates the act of drawing and image making.
Bobbie McKibbin taught art-making at Grinnell College in central Iowa for 31 years. Struck by the midwest’s vibrant colors and wide open spaces, she committed herself to capturing those landscapes in pastel, her preferred medium for over four decades. McKibbin has exhibited extensively throughout the United States with major shows in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Des Moines, Minneapolis, Hawaii, and Montana. Her artwork has been collected by the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, the Des Moines Art Center, and the Missoula Art Museum. Now living in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, she continues to depict, document and illuminate the landscape that surrounds her.
McKibbin impresses me as exceptionally skillful technically...and sensitive to the kind of interpretive values in subject matter that make the difference between skillful rendition and significant art. She finds in the most commonplace views of daily American life a native poetry that is all the more effective for their subtly controlled understatement.
--John Canaday
author of Mainstreams of Modern Art