Charles Gaines (born 1944) is an American visual artist, whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in conceptual art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics.[1] There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores[2] as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt.[3] He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Charles Gaines
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| Born | 1944 (age 79–80)
Charleston, South Carolina, United States
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| Education | Jersey City State College, Rochester Institute of Technology |
| Occupation | Visual artist |
| Known for | Photography, drawings, installation art, video art |
| Movement | Conceptual art |
Gaines was born in Charleston, South Carolina. Raised in Newark, New Jersey, he attended Newark Arts High School and received a BA from Jersey City State College in 1966.[4] He earned his MFA in 1967 as the first African American to be accepted into the MFA program at the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
From 1967 to 1990 he was a professor of art at California State University, Fresno. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts, influencing many young artists who studied with him, among them Edgar Arceneaux, Sadie Barnette, Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Sam Durant, Rodney McMillian, and Laura Owens.[5] In 2008 Gaines taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
InMotion: Trisha Brown Dance (1981), Gaines photographed postmodern dancer Trisha Brown performing the piece Son of Gone Fishin'. Numbering the spaces in a grid that correspond with the body in motion, and overlaying another grid drawing for each image in the series, Gaines seeks to transcribe the moving body in a way that the photograph cannot. In doing so, he also creates an erasure of the body's distinguishing contours – aligning with Trisha Brown's embrace of structures that obscure themselves.[6] With the series Walnut Tree Orchard, Charles Gaines started working with photographs in his artworks in addition to mathematical formulas, continuing the use of grid paper.[7]
In addition to working on his art, Gaines has been serving on the advisory board of the Hauser & Wirth Institute since 2018.[8]
After his first New York City exhibition at Cinque Gallery[9][10] in 1972, Charles Gaines was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. In the 1980s, Charles Gaines was represented by and had solo exhibitionsatLeo Castelli Gallery and John Weber Gallery[11] in New York. He has shown at Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles,[12] Young Hoffman in Chicago, Richard Heller Gallery in San Francisco, and Galerie Lavignes-Bastille in Paris, among others. In 2006 Gaines began to exhibit with Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, and in 2014 with Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
During the 1970s, he participated in a community art space called Communications Village operated by printmaker Benjamin Leroy Wigfall in Kingston, NY. Andrews made prints with the help of printer assistants who had been taught printmaking by Wigfall, and he exhibited there.[13]
Most recently, he was included in 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor in 2015. His work has been included in other major group exhibitions, including the 2007 Venice Biennale, "Blues for Smoke" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012) and Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960 – 1980, curated by Kellie Jones at the Hammer Museum and Under the Big Black Sun: 1974–1981, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles which was curated by Paul Schimmel as part of the 2011 Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative, Gaines was featured in two prominent Los Angeles exhibitions:
In 2012 the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer Art Gallery in Claremont, CA, exhibited In The Shadow of Numbers, Charles Gaines Selected Works from 1975 to 2012[14] which involved a collaborative musical performance with Terry Adkins. Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1999,[15] the artist's first survey exhibition, was organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem in July 2014.
In 2019 the SculptureCenter, Queens, New York, exhibited Searching the Sky for Rain from September 16, 2019 – December 16, 2019 which is a collaboration of many artist such as Carmen Argote, Tony Cokes, Rafael Domenech, Mandy El-Sayegh, ektor garcia, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, Tishan Hsu, Rindon Johnson, Becket MWN, Shahryar Nashat, Michael Queenland, Johanna Unzueta, Jala Wahid, Eric Wesley, Riet Wijnen and Charles Gaines included. The Searching the Sky for Rain exhibit has only two of his works within them. The one placed in the ground floor was the “Numbers and Trees: Central Park Series II: Tree #7" (made in 2016) Laurel and the second placed in the lower level being "Face 1: Identity Politics, #10, Edward Said" (made in 2018).[16]
From November 16, 2023 to March 17 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami exhibited a survey of his work, including the recreation of some of his major pieces for the context of the exhibition.[17]
Gaines received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant in 1977. He received a California Community Foundation (CCF)[18] in 2011, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Gaines received the CalArts REDCAT Award in 2018[19] and was awarded the 60th annual Edward MacDowell Medal in 2019.[20] In 2023, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from his alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology.[21]
Gaines has written a number of academic texts including: Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism[22] (UC Irvine, 1993); Art, Post History and the Paradox of Black Pluralism, Merge, 12 (2004); "Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy: Art and the Suppression of Thought", Art Lies, Issue 64 (Winter/2009); "Ben Patterson: The History of Gray Matter From the Avant-garde to the Postmodern", a catalog essay for an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (November 2010); and Kerry James Marshall, London: Phaidon Press, 2017.
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2019
Gaines is represented by Hauser & Wirth (since 2018) and Galerie Max Hetzler.[24] He previously worked with Paula Cooper Gallery and Vielmetter Los Angeles.[25]
One of the problems I had is that black political expressionism became a very dominant idea among black artists in the late 60s and early 70s and I did abstract work and there was no place for me.