Charles Gaines: Content and Form; Writings, Lectures, and Conversations

The definitive collection of pioneering Conceptual artist Charles Gaines’ reflections on art, philosophy, and identity over more than four decades.

Alongside his career as an artist, Charles Gaines has engaged deeply with the history of aesthetics, philosophy, and politics through parallel writing and teaching practices for over half a century. Edited by curator Kate Fowle, this volume brings together his most important writings, lectures, and conversations, including his groundbreaking 1993 essay “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism.” Other pieces—among them reflections on the work of fellow artists and several previously unpublished or reworked texts from his time as an influential member of the CalArts faculty—offer insights into Gaines’s thinking about topics including art and philosophy, reality and representation, and metonymy and metaphor, while also revealing the humor and enthusiasm behind his artistic and conceptual commitments. Complementing these texts are illuminating interviews with Homi K. Bhabha, Saidiya Hartman, Rashid Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, Courtney J. Martin, Fred Moten, and Ellen Tani. This publication invites readers to discover the ideas and contexts that have nourished and enriched Gaines’s artistic practice throughout his storied career.