Charles Gaines
Numbers and Trees: Palm Canyon, Palm Trees Series 3
17 August - 31 December 2020
Online Exhibition
Beginning 17 August, Charles Gaines – pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, esteemed CalArts educator, and influential member of the LA arts community – will present an online exhibition of 10 Plexiglas gridworks conceived and executed in recent months during this time of isolation.
‘Charles Gaines. Numbers and Trees: Palm Canyon, Palm Trees Series 3’ is a continuation of the artist’s critically admired 2019 exhibition ‘Charles Gaines. Palm Trees and Other Works’ at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. In this new series, ‘Numbers and Trees: Palm Canyon, Palm Trees Series 3’ (2020), Gaines evolves the complex conceptual system employed in his previous series to create smaller, gridded forms of palm trees in acrylic on and behind Plexiglas. With the form of the palm tree serving as a common denominator across these distinct series, Gaines makes successive modifications to scale, color, and background, evidencing his theory that while ‘the system has never changed, the outcome is always different.’ Each work in this third palm tree series is titled with a state where this type of tree naturally grows.
Naima J. Keith, Vice President of Education and Public Programs at LACMA and curator of his 2014 survey exhibition, ‘Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974 – 1989,’ has commented upon Gaines’s unwavering readiness to test the boundaries of his generative process: ‘Charles continuously challenges himself to maintain a systematic approach to producing works of art, and because of his willingness to push the algorithm ever so gently each time – whether that’s with scale, the background image, or color – artists, curators, and viewers know he is still committed to working in a certain way, but is open to taking on more risks as his practice grows and as he grows as an artist.’
Images of trees have figured prominently in Gaines’s practice since the mid-1970s, when he first began plotting their forms through a system of numbered grids in the series ‘Walnut Tree Orchard’ (1975 – 2014). His methodical examination continues in the ‘Numbers and Trees’ Plexiglas series, which began in 1986 and has continually evolved to include the work in this online exhibition. Each work in ‘Numbers and Trees: Palm Canyon, Palm Trees Series 3’ (2020) was realized by overlaying the forms of trees one at a time and in succession. Following this process, each of the 10 trees was assigned a distinctive color and a numbered grid that reflects the positive space of the tree. The back panel features an enlarged detail, or as Gaines refers to it, an ‘exploded’ image of the newest tree. As seen in ‘Numbers and Trees: Palm Canyon, Palm Trees Series 3, Tree #2, Arizona’ (2020), the second tree in the series, this work features two distinct trees on the surface of the Plexiglas and an ‘exploded’ image of the second tree in a color that presages the third tree in the following work of the series. From a distance, these swaths of color form a cohesive effect on the grid. Upon approach, the work reveals the forms’ representational underpinnings and frameworks – a model that Gaines has consistently employed in his critique of systems and representation.
By constructing space between a specific symbol and the systems applied to its representation through measurable values of color, Gaines’s distinctive approach forges a critical link between first generation American conceptualists like Sol LeWitt, and subsequent generations of artists that include Gaines’s former students Edgar Arceneaux, Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, and Sam Durant, among others who are pushing the limits of conceptualism today. Speaking about his longstanding commitment to unveiling the paradoxes of human visual understanding, Gaines has said, ‘The old idea is that you can’t have feelings if you’re thinking. My idea is that you can’t have feelings unless you’re thinking. If an image can be produced or a work can be produced out of a system, then the idea of the creative imagination as being necessary for works of art would be false.’
Forthcoming Museum Exhibition and Recent Award
In February 2021, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present ‘New Work: Charles Gaines,’ a solo exhibition featuring ‘Manifestos 4’ (2020), a multi-media installation comprised of four drawings, two videos, and a musical composition for a sextet, as well as ‘Skybox 2’ (2020), an immersive experience of text and the night sky. These new works have emerged from Gaines’s research into the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, which proclaimed Black people were not considered US citizens and thus rights that the Constitution granted did not apply to them. By subjecting these historical documents to his rules-based methodologies, Gaines disrupts our suppositions rooted in rational information and explores the realm of the sublime. ‘Skybox 1’ (2011) is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
In 2019, Gaines was the recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal, which has been awarded annually since 1960 to artists who have made an outstanding contribution to American culture, including Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Robert Frost, Toni Morrison, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
About the Artist
Charles Gaines
A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Charles 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.
Born in 1944 in Charleston, South Carolina, Gaines began his career as a painter, earning his M.F.A. from the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1967. In the 1970s, Gaines’ art shifted dramatically in response to what he would later call ‘the awakening.’ Gaines’ epiphany materialized in a series called Regression (1973 – 1974), in which he explored the use of mathematical and numeric systems to create soft, numbered marks in ink on a grid, with each drawing built upon the calculations of the last. This methodical approach would carry the artist into the subsequent decades of his artistic journey.
Working both within the system and against it, Gaines points to the tensions between the empirical objective and the viewers’ subjective response. The concept of identity politics has played a central role within Gaines’ oeuvre, and the radical approach he employs addresses issues of race in ways that transcend the limits of representation.
Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and around the world, most notably a major traveling survey at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; a mid-career survey at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Gallery in Claremont CA; a museum survey of early works at The Studio Museum, Harlem NY and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA; and presentations at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015. An exhibition of his work is also currently on long-term view at Dia:Beacon in New York. 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 June 2025. Additional forthcoming public commissions include the mural ‘Numbers and Trees: Cincinnati Cottonwoods,’ organized by Cincinnati nonprofit ArtWorks (June 2025); ‘Hanging Tree’ at Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery AL (June 2025); and a new work for the Intuit Dome in Inglewood CA (spring 2026). Gaines will be an artist-in-residence at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in spring 2025 and a book of his collected writings will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in 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 ‘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.
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, Harlem 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.
Current Exhibitions
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