A wacky former MIT professor took cinema verite to a whole new level by robbing a Manhattan bank and recording the heist, authorities said.
Joseph Gibbons, 61, a filmmaker and “visual artist’’ who taught for a decade at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, has gone rogue, robbing banks as part of his latest “art’’ project.
Gibbons was charged on Friday with robbery after allegedly making off with $1,000 from a Capital One branch at Bowery and Grand Street in Chinatown.
While waiting for his arraignment, the eccentric academic boasted to fellow inmates that his crime was for art’s sake.
“He was doing research for a film,” said his dazzled cell-mate Kaylan Sherrard, 27.
“It’s not a crime; it’s artwork… He’s an intellectual,” Sherrard gushed.
In former interviews, Gibbons has admitted to using illegal drugs to inspire his short, semi-autobiographical films.
“The romantic idea of the artist getting involved in these kinds of activities as a kind of research, gaining experience. But that was the big inspiration on me,” Gibbons told online art journal “Big, Red & Shiny.”
Now facing felony charges in two states, Gibbons appears to have taken his modus operandi a bit far.
He entered the Manhattan bank on New Year’s Eve around 2 p.m., wielding a camcorder and politely handed the teller a note demanding a donation for his church, according to court documents.
Rhode Island police had also been hunting for Gibbons, who staged a similar stick-up there in mid-November and made off with $3,000 in cash, authorities said.
Judge Abraham Clott set bail at $50,000 after Gibbons’ attorney said his client was mentally sound.
Gibbons, who lives in a Boston suburb, has held teaching gigs and artistic fellowships with several esteemed organizations.
He was a visiting artist at Bard College in the ’90s and an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2001-2010, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The filmmaker, who’s been out of work for four years, had previously waxed romantic about basing art on his own illicit activities.
“I just worried if I had enough problems within me that I could exploit. So when I ran [out] of my own—I started creating them—I made one or two films based on drug addiction.
“Before that it was voyeurism,” Gibbons once told the art journal.