CHARLES GAINES

A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Charles Gaines’s body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create a series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today.

Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles. He recently retired from the CalArts School of Art, where he was on faculty for over 30 years and established a fellowship to provide critical scholarship support for Black students in the M.F.A. program. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and around the world, most notably at Dia: Beacon, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Hammer Museum. His work has also been presented at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015.

Gaines has been recently commissioned to create large-scale permanent public works for Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, Montgomery, AL; Culver City, CA; Intuit Dome, Inglewood, CA; and John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York. Gaines has published several essays on contemporary art, including Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (University of California, Irvine, 1993; new edition forthcoming in 2024) and The New Cosmopolitanism (California State University, Fullerton, 2008). His collected writings will be published by Hauser & Wirth in late 2025.

In 2019, Gaines received the 60th Edward MacDowell Medal. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design’s 2020 class of National Academicians and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2022. In 2023, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.