Charles Gaines (artist) facts for kids

Charles Gaines (born 1944) is an American artist. He creates art that makes you think about ideas like beauty, politics, and how we understand the world. His art often uses systems, especially grids, and combines them with photos, drawings, and video installations.

Gaines is known for his conceptual art. This type of art focuses on the ideas behind the artwork, rather than just how it looks. He was one of the few African-American conceptual artists in the 1970s. At that time, many Black artists focused on political messages. But Gaines explored abstract ideas and didn't always make direct statements about race or politics. Music is also a big part of his work. He often uses musical scores and explores ideas like indeterminacy, which means things that are not fixed or certain. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Early Life and Education

Charles Gaines was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey. He went to Newark Arts High School. In 1966, he earned his first degree from Jersey City State College.

A year later, in 1967, he earned his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree. He was the first African American student accepted into the MFA program at the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Teaching Art to Others

From 1967 to 1990, Gaines was an art professor at California State University, Fresno. Since 1989, he has taught at the California Institute of the Arts. He has inspired many young artists who studied with him. Some of his famous students include Mark Bradford and Laura Owens. In 2008, Gaines also taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Charles Gaines' Art Career

Charles Gaines creates art that often uses grids and mathematical systems. He combines these with photography and drawings.

In his work Motion: Trisha Brown Dance (1981), Gaines photographed the dancer Trisha Brown. He numbered the spaces in a grid that matched her moving body. Then, he added another grid drawing over each photo. He wanted to show how the body moves in a way that a simple photograph cannot. This also made the dancer's exact shape less clear, which was part of Trisha Brown's own artistic style.

With his series Walnut Tree Orchard, Gaines started using photographs in his art. He continued to use grid paper and mathematical ideas.

Some of his well-known art series include:

• Explosions
• History of Stars
• NIGHT/CRIMES
• Shadows
• Walnut Tree Orchard (1975-2014)
• String Theory
• Manifestos
• Sound Text (2015)

Besides making his own art, Gaines has also been on the advisory board of the Hauser & Wirth Institute since 2018.

Art Exhibitions

Charles Gaines has shown his art in many places. His first exhibition in New York City was in 1972. In 1975, his work was part of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In the 1980s, he had solo exhibitions at important galleries like Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. He has also shown his art in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Paris. Since 2006, he has exhibited with Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Since 2014, he has shown with Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

In 2015, his work was featured in the 56th Venice Biennale, a very important international art show. He has also been part of other major group exhibitions. These include "Blues for Smoke" (at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012) and Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960 – 1980 (at the Hammer Museum).

In 2012, the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer Art Gallery in Claremont, California, held an exhibition called In The Shadow of Numbers, Charles Gaines Selected Works from 1975 to 2012. This show included a musical performance with artist Terry Adkins.

In 2014, The Studio Museum in Harlem organized Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1999. This was the first big show looking back at his art over many years.

In 2019, the SculptureCenter in New York showed Searching the Sky for Rain. This exhibition included two of Gaines' works: "Numbers and Trees: Central Park Series II: Tree #7" (2016) and "Face 1: Identity Politics, #10, Edward Said" (2018).

Most recently, from November 2023 to March 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami held a large exhibition of his work.

Awards and Honors

Charles Gaines has received many important awards for his art:

• He received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant in 1977.
• He received a California Community Foundation (CCF) award in 2011.
• He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013.
• In 2018, Gaines received the CalArts REDCAT Award.
• In 2019, he was given the 60th annual Edward MacDowell Medal.
• In 2023, his old college, Rochester Institute of Technology, gave him an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.

Writing About Art

Charles Gaines has also written several academic articles and essays about art. These include:

• Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (1993)
• "Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy: Art and the Suppression of Thought" (2009)
• An essay about artist Ben Patterson (2010)
• A book about artist Kerry James Marshall (2017)

Solo Exhibitions

Here are some of Charles Gaines' solo art shows:

• 2022: Gridwork: Palm Canyon Watercolors, Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris
• 2021: New Work: Charles Gaines, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
• 2021: Dia Beacon, Beacon
• 2021: Multiples of Nature, Trees and Faces, Hauser & Wirth, London
• 2021: Drawings, Hauser & Wirth, St. Moritz
• 2019: Palm Trees and Other Works, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles
• 2018: Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
• 2018: Faces 1: Identity Politics, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Group Exhibitions

Here are some group art shows that included Charles Gaines' work:

2022

• Forest Through the Trees, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis
• Lifes, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

2021

• Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York
• Kathmandu Triennial, Kathmandu
• Blood, Sweat, and Tears, UMLAUF Sculpture Garden and Museum, Austin
• Lives that Bind: a restorative justice installation, Santa Monica City Hall East, Santa Monica

2020

• Lives that Bind: a restorative justice installation City Services Building Art Bank, Santa Monica
• Drawing 2020, Gladstone Gallery, New York
• To Form a More Perfect Union, Hauser & Wirth, New York
• Artists for New York, Hauser & Wirth, New York
• Garden of Six Seasons, Para Site, Hong Kong

2019

• Words, Alexander Berggruen, New York
• Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore
• Searching the Sky for Rain, SculptureCenter, New York
• Process and Pattern, Wisch Family Gallery, Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford
• Trees, Fondation Cartier pour l´art contemporain, Paris
• The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor
• About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
• California Artists in the Marciano Collection, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles
• Mapping Black Identities, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis
• Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner / Giuffrida Collection, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago

Public Art Collections

Charles Gaines' art can be found in many public museums and collections. Some of these include:

• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
• Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
• Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore
• Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC
• Lentos Museum, Linz
• Marciano Collection, Los Angeles
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
• Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (which has his work "Explosion #25", 2008)