Artist Talk: Charles Gaines in Conversation with Thelma Golden, Laura Owens, and Gary Simmons

Charles Gaines, noted American artist, educator, and recipient of the 2019 Edward MacDowell Medal, joins Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum, Laura Owens, and Gary Simmons, LA-based artists and former students of Gaines, for a discussion about his systematic approach to artmaking and his new works presented in ‘Palm Trees and Other Works.’ This event is free, however, reservations are recommended. Click here to register.   About 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, and has been a member of the CalArts School of Art faculty since 1990. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and internationally, and his work is in prominent public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA. Gaines’ work was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015.

About Thelma Golden Thelma Golden is Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she began her career in 1987 before joining the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. After a decade at the Whitney, she returned to the Studio Museum in 2000 as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, and was named Director and Chief Curator in 2005. Golden was appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House by President Obama in 2010, and in 2015 joined the Barack Obama Foundation’s Board of Directors. She also sits on the Board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Crystal Bridges Museum. Golden is a 2008 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and is the recipient of the 2016 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. In 2015, she was appointed as a Ford Foundation Art of Change Visiting Fellow and in 2017, Golden was honored with both the Outstanding Contributions to the Arts Award from the Americans for the Arts and the Groundbreaker Award from Prospect.4 New Orleans. In 2018, Golden was awarded a J. Paul Getty Medal. She has received honorary degrees from Columbia University, the City College of New York, Smith College, and a Barnard Medal of Distinction from Barnard College.   About Laura Owens Laura Owens lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the California Institute of Arts. For more than twenty years, Owens has pioneered an innovative approach to painting that challenges traditional assumptions about the nature of figuration and abstraction, the relationships among avant-garde art, craft, and pop culture, and the interplay between painting and contemporary technologies. Her work is characterized by a ranging, nuanced and often humorous approach to her medium, one that has seen her embrace and reinvent sources from inside and outside the canon – whether avant-garde, decorative, high-brow, popular or personal. Owens was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017-19), Dallas Museum of Art and MOCA Los Angeles. Other recent solo exhibitions include those at CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2016) and Secession, Vienna (2015). In summer 2020, the artist will present an exhibition at Cleveland Museum of Art in collaboration with high school students participating in the CMA’s Arts Mastery program. Owens is represented by Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York / Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. About Gary Simmons Gary Simmons, a LA based artist, utilizes icons of US pop culture, architecture, and film in his drawings and paintings, which address personal and societal issues of class and race. Racial identity and politics are essential to his work, ruminating on how perception of the past creates uncertainties in the formation of present and future American society. Simmons ​received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988, and his MFA from CalArts in 1990. Shortly thereafter he was awarded both the National Endowment for the Arts Interarts Grant and the Penny McCall Foundation Grant.