In Residence: Charles Gaines

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is delighted to welcome Charles Gaines as our artist-in-residence in April 2025.

A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Gaines’ 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.

His exquisitely original and diverse practice spans photography, drawing, installation, music and writing, in a rigorous investigation of systems, cognition, and language that has unfolded over more than five decades.

Gaines’ work is included in prominent public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA; and Tate, London, UK.

In 2022, Gaines launched his most ambitious public art project yet, ‘The American Manifest,’ presented by Creative Time, Governors Island and Times Square Arts. The third and final chapter of ‘The American Manifest,’ organized by Creative Time, will travel to the banks of the Ohio River in late 2025. Additional forthcoming public commissions include: the mural ‘Numbers and Trees: Cincinnati Cottonwoods,’ organized by Cincinnati nonprofit ArtWorks (June 2025); ‘Hanging Tree,’ Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, Montgomery AL (June 2025); and a new work for the Intuit Dome in Inglewood CA (Spring 2026).

In addition to his artistic practice, Gaines was on the faculty at CalArts School of Art for over 30 years, establishing a fellowship to provide critical scholarship support for Black students in the M.F.A. Art program. He has published several essays on contemporary art, including: ‘The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism’ (University of California, Irvine, 1993) and ‘The New Cosmopolitanism’ (California State University, Fullerton, 2008). A book of his collected writings will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in Spring 2026. In 2023, he was inducted into the National Academy of Design’s Class of National Academicians and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2022. In 2023, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York NY.