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.
In 1967, he was hired to teach art history and painting at Mississippi Valley State University (then Mississippi Valley State College) in Itta Bena.[5] From 1968 to 1990 he was a professor of art at California State University, Fresno. He was a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts from 1989 until his retirement in 2022, 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.[6] In 2023, in an effort to address the lack of diversity in art institutions, he established the Charles Gaines Fellowship to provide scholarship support to Black students in the MFA program at CalArts, who are historically underrepresented in the school's MFA program.[7] In 2008 Gaines taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Art career
While living in New York City in 1974, Gaines was encouraged by printmaker Robert (Bob) Blackburn to meet the teacher and printmaker Benjamin Leroy Wigfall. In 1973Wigfall had launched a community printshop called Communications Village in Kingston, NY, and invited Gaines to be a visiting artist. There, with the help of printer assistants who studied with Wigfall, he translated his earliest systems-based abstractions, such as Circles and X's, into intaglio prints.[8]
In Motion: 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.[9] 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.[10]
Explosions
History of Stars
NIGHT/CRIMES
Shadows
Walnut Tree Orchard (1975-2014)
String Theory
Manifestos
Sound Text (2015)
In addition to working on his art, Gaines has been serving on the advisory board of the Hauser & Wirth Institute since 2018.[11]
Curatorial Projects
Gaines developed numerous curatorial projects as part of his artistic research. Two early exhibitions focused on black artists engaged in abstraction. In 1974, he curated the exhibition "Black Artists, Recent Attitudes" at the art gallery art Fresno State University, which featured primarily abstract works by Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Ernest Crichlow, Martin Puryear and Raymond Saunders - artists who became a major source of encouragement for Gaines.[12][13][14] He staged "Black Artists, Recent Attitudes II" at Fresno State University in 1982, which included Robert Blackburn, Melvin Edwards, Elizabeth Catlett, Edward Clark, Martin Puryear, William Hutson, and William T. Williams.[15]
Exhibitions
After his first New York City exhibition at Cinque Gallery[16][17] in 1972, Gaines was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. His work was included in the traveling group exhibition Numerals: 1924-1977, organized by Leo Castelli Gallery and the Yale University Art Gallery, in 1978.[18] In the 1980s, he was represented by and had solo exhibitions at Leo Castelli Gallery and John Weber Gallery[19] in New York. He has shown at Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles,[20] 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.
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[21] which involved a collaborative musical performance with Terry Adkins. Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1999,[22] 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).[23]
From November 16, 2023 to March 17, 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami organized a survey of his work from 1992-2003, including the recreation of some of his major pieces for the context of the exhibition.[24]
From August 16, 2025 to February 1, 2026, the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited Night/Crimes, a series he created from 1994-1997.[25]
Gaines has written a number of academic texts including: Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism[30] (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);[31] "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.
↑ Gaines, Charles (December 14, 2011). "Interview with Charles Gaines by Leila Hamidi". Notes on Looking: Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles. Archived from the original on August 10, 2014. Retrieved March 17, 2012. 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.
↑ The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism. Irvine, California: Irvine Fine Arts Gallery University of California. 1993. pp.11, 12, 56. ISBN1884355005.
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