Charles Gaines

The work of pivotal artist, writer, and professor Charles Gaines 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. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Gaines’s contribution to Declare juxtaposes Thomas Jefferson’s notion of the “tree of liberty” with the poplar tree references in the iconic anti-lynching protest song “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol in 1938. Recalling the founding father’s idealized justification for the bloodshed of the Revolutionary War, along with the brutality of the Jim Crow South, Gaines highlights America’s complicated history in the pursuit of equality and justice.