Creative Time presents Charles Gaines

Photo Credit: Charles Gaines, © Charles Gaines, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

Roanoke College is partnering with Creative Time, an internationally renowned nonprofit arts organization, to plan the construction of a permanent memorial on campus through the Center for Studying Structures of Race Memorial and Monuments project. Creative Time’s mission-driven work helps artists contribute to central issues of our times. Through this partnership, Creative Time will help develop a comprehensive plan to honor and recognize, on campus, the role of enslaved people in the history of the College and greater Southwest Virginia.  This partnership is possible thanks to the generosity of Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo ’78, a member of the Roanoke College Board of Trustees. This webinar features artist and author, Charles Gaines of Los Angeles, Ca.

Sponsored by the Center for Studying Structures of Race, the Memorials, Monuments & Memory Lecture Series brings to campus a number of artists, architects, and scholars whose work addresses the role of monuments and memorials in society. Presented in tandem with the spring INQ 300 capstone course by the same name, the Memorials, Monuments & Memory Lecture Series invites students and the public to examine the intersection of art, public memory, and history. The speaking series precedes planning for the school's commission of a new memorial commemorating the enslaved persons who built the College and contributed to the wider region

A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Charles Gaines has long employed a generative process to create series of works in a variety of mediums. By creating 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 and subsequent generations of artists who are pushing the limits of conceptualism today. Charles Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles, where he has been a member of the California Institute of Arts faculty since 1989. Gaines’ work is currently the subject of a solo exhibitions at Dia. Other notable exhibitions include an exhibition of new work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2021), a museum survey of his Gridwork at The Studio Museum, Harlem NY (2014), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA (2015), as well as a mid-career survey at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Gallery in Claremont CA (2012). 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.

EDUCATION
Master of Fine Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY, 1967
Bachelor of Arts, Jersey City State College, Jersey City NJ, 1966

Additional Participants:
Dr. Jesse Bucher, Roanoke College
Justine Ludwig, Creative Time

The Memorials, Monuments & Memory Lecture Series is co-presented by the Center for Studying Structures of Race and acclaimed public art organization Creative Time.