140. Charles Gaines

American artist Charles Gaines’ body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. In his drawings, works on paper and photographs he investigates how rule-based processes and systems construct the experiences of aesthetics, politics, and language. By employing multi-layered practices, including images, texts, and grids, as well as working in a serial character, Gaines examines image structures while critically questioning forms of representation.

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, Harlem NY, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA. His work has also been presented at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015. In addition to his artistic practice, Gaines has published several essays on contemporary art, including Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (University of California, Irvine, 1993) and The New Cosmopolitanism (California State University, Fullerton, 2008). 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.

He and I spoke about legacy, continuous learning, creating context and systems, paradoxes of perception, feeling versus intellectual exercises in art, the language of art and what is possible, tantric Buddhist art, chance as a method, philosophy of aesthetics, trees, and AI!