THE HEADLINES

ASPEN’S GRASP. Known for winter sports and other outdoor recreation, Aspen, Colorado, has become increasingly celebrated as an art destination, reports The Art Newspaper. The Aspen Art Week brings together collectors, curators and artists in a culture festival co-ordinated by Aspen Art Museum. This summer, the Aspen Art Fair (29 July-2 August) joins in with a debut at the high-profile Hotel Jerome, in the city center. About 30 exhibitors and projects—from Los Angeles (Carlye Packer, Casterline Goodman), New York (Miles McEnery, Nancy Hoffman) and abroad (El Apartamento from Havana and Madrid, Galerie Gmurzynska from Zürich, Perrotin from Paris)—are in the art fair’s lineup. Admission to the event costs $30 per day, except for those statying at the hotel who get complimentary passes. “It’s really important to us to be part of the citywide cultural conversation year round,” said Becca Hoffman, the director of the fair.

TO RETURN OR TO LOAN? Objects from London’s British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum are on loan at the Manhyia Palace Museum in the center of Kumasi, Ghana, while Los Angeles’s Fowler Museum has transferred ownership of seven items, reports The Art Newspaper. The UK loans include gold items, soul-washers’ badges, a figure of an eagle and a symbolically charged peace pipe, as well as the important ceremonial sword known as the Mponponsuo. There are also seven items from the Fowler Museum on view. Most of the returned items are colonial loot, seized by British troops during the Asante wars. A few others were legitimately acquired, not in battle. Ownership of the seven Fowler items has been formally transferred to the Asantehene, who is now free to use the regalia for ceremonial purposes. The BM and V&A objects, however, are required to be treated as artworks. The UK museums are returning material as three-year loans, with the option of a three-year extension.

THE DIGEST

Dr. Robert Boulay, who devoted his life to identifying Kanak works for the world’s most prestigious museums, including Paris’s Quai Branly, has died at the age of 80 years old. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

Collectors Andrée and Gérard Patt have given the town of Audincourt, in the Franche-Comté region, 236 works of modern and contemporary art. The retired couple, who started amassing their treasures in the early 2000s, aquired their first paintings from a gallery in Megève. Their donation includes pieces by Salvador Dali, Pierre Alechinsky, Roberto Matta, Lucio Fontana, Arman, Hervé Di Rosa, Jean Messagier… [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

Seven artists with connections to Los Angeles, including contemporary conceptualists Glenn Kaino (b. 1872) and Charles Gaines (b. 1944), were commissioned to bridge sports and culture, by creating works for the Intuit Dome, an indoor arena under construction in Inglewood, California. [The New York Times]

An extremely rare vinyl record by the Sex Pistols has been sold by record specialists Wessex Auction Rooms for a record-breaking price. The controversial single God Save the Queen was released in the 1970s. About 25,000 records were withdrawn from sale after a backlash to lyrics describing the monarchy as a “fascist regime”. A few copies remained in circulation, including the one that sold for £24,320. [BBC]

Linda C. Harrison got the profile treatment from Tiffany Dodson in Harper’s Bazaar, the director of the Newark Museum of Art’s, one of the few African-Americans leading a major art museum. She assisted the institution in becoming more inviting to residents of the New Jersey city. [Harper’s Bazaar]

THE KICKER

LOONEY TURN OF EVENTS. Sydney artist Philjames’ oil on lithograph “Jesus Speaks to the Daughters of Jerusalem”, depicting Christ overlaid with Looney Tunes characters, was removed from the Blake Art Prize exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Center, after fierce criticism hit the artist and gallery on Friday, just two days before the eight-week exhibition ended. The biennial award recognizes contemporary artworks that explore spirituality and religion, and draws talents from all beliefs and cultural backgrounds. However complaints suddenly broke out online. Some protesters, who see the work as an insult to Christianity, have threatened the museum and its staff, including volunteers, with violence. [The Guardian]

THE HEADLINES

AGE AS A CONCEPT. Three of Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde animal sculptures dated to the 1990’s were in fact made in 2017, according an investigation by the Guardian . The backdated works preserve a dove, a shark, and two calves, and have been shown around the world as examples of work from “the early to mid-1990’s,” a highly valued period in Hirst’s career. But it appears Hirst’s workshop employees in Dudbridge, Gloucestershire made them in 2017. The news may explain why the pieces were unknown before their public display, and the Guardian “could find no mention anywhere of the works having existed, in any form, prior to 2017.” In response, Hirst’s company, Science Ltd, said: “Formaldehyde works are conceptual artworks and the date Damien Hirst assigns to them is the date of the conception of the work.” 

ARTIST SURVEY CENSORED. The Los Angeles-based artist Charles Gaines told ARTnews’ Senior Editor Maximiliano Duron that the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami not only removed one artwork from his major survey for a brief period, as was revealed last week, but had also at various points, attempted to block certain works from going on view, because of their political content, and suggested altering an artwork in order to remove a word used in it. The museum reportedly took down a work depicting the late Palestinian critic and activist  Edward Said around the time of the museum’s annual benefit, and later re-added it to the show.

THE DIGEST

A brand-new Banksy mural that appeared last weekend in Finsbury Park, London, was defaced with large splashes of white paint. Locals discovered the act of vandalism early today, and tall metal fencing has been installed around the tree and the wall Banksy painted to look like green foliage, with a stenciled person looking up at it. [BBC]

Hong Kong’s government moved on Tuesday to pass tough new security laws intended to limit foreign influence and dissent. The Beijing-backed political policies are hurting the city’s image as a dynamic economic and cultural center, amid fears of censorship in the arts. [The New York Times]

Meanwhile, Art Basel Hong Kong opens later this month, and The New York Times has dedicated a series of articles around the event, which organizers have said will be larger this year, reaching a “pre-pandemic scale.” [The New York Times]

Two visitors say they were denied entry to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, because they possessed a Palestinian headscarf, or keffiyeh. [Hyperallergic]

The UK government has pledged to streamline customs processes to boost the domestic art market and simplify art imports. The decision responds to significant red tape around customs, which grew following Brexit, corresponding to an imports drop by more than half of pre-Brexit-vote levels. [The Art Newspaper]

Hélio Menezes has been named the new director of São Paulo’s Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo. [ArtReview]

Sharon Stone talks to The Guardian about her art practice in time for a solo exhibition at a Berlin gallery, and another opening in San Francisco. “Before we start killing and maiming and wounding thousands of women and children, we need big brains, more emotional intelligence, not more small-penis energy. My painting is about all that,” Stone said. [The Guardian]

Archaeologists have found a grouping of petroglyphs in circular motifs, called “Cariri Indian carvings,” beside dinosaur tracks in Brazil’s Paraíba State, at what is known as the Serrote do Letreiro Site. [Heritage Daily]

THE KICKER

CULTURAL SWISS ARMY KNIFE. Architect Francois Chatillon takes the Financial Times on a tour of the Grand Palais, a massive, glass-domed venue built in 1900, equally coveted by organizers of art fairs, fashion shows, and agro-industrialists, as it nears the late stages of its renovation. Following “endless debates about what to save and what to modernize,” the historic monument is set to open its central nave in time for the Paris 2024 Olympics. The newly expanded space, which Chatillon compares to a cultural “Swiss Army knife,” is about 775,000-square-feet and frees up areas previously off-limits to the public, while restoring the monument’s original central axis. “When you step through the rotunda, you’ll get a perspective that no one has seen since 1939,” Chatillon said.

Gaines’s show closed this past Sunday, however, last week, in its final days, the Miami New Times revealed that the ICA briefly removed from it a work depicting the late Palestinian thinker Edward Said. The museum reportedly removed the artwork earlier this month, around the time of the museum’s annual benefit, and later readded it to the show.

According to Gaines, it was not the only work that the museum wanted to leave out of the exhibit.

In mid-November, a few days before the exhibition was set to open, Gaines said, the museum’s artistic director, Alex Gartenfeld, asked that one work belonging to the series “Librettos: Manuel de Falla/Stokely Carmichael” (2015–20), featuring words from a 1967 speech on Black power by Black Panther Party leader Stokely Carmichael, not be in the show. As part of the 1967 speech, Gaines said, Carmichael makes “sweeping critical comments about racism in the world, and a part of that is his comment criticizing Israel for the treatment of Palestinians.”

Gaines recalled that the reasoning Gartenfeld gave for replacing the work with another from the series was that “it was a sensitive subject.” The exhibition opened in mid-November, a little more than a month after the October 7 attack by Hamas, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages. Since then, Israel has repeatedly bombed Gaza, where more than 31,000 Gazans have been killed to date.

In the end, Gaines agreed to swap the works. He said he was willing to compromise on the work’s removal because the “substance of the series could be sustained.”

In response to a fact-checking query from ARTnews, the ICA Miami characterized Carmichael’s speech as containing antisemitic remarks and generalizations of Jewish people, citing a rise in hate crimes in South Florida around the exhibition’s opening. In an email to ARTnews on Tuesday, Gaines clarified that he had agreed to remove the work so that “any controversy would be avoided” and because “exchanging it for another work did not undermine the critical interests of the work.” 

The work, which is based on a 1967 speech by Carmichael, features the activist saying that “land is power,” and noting, “The precedent is set. Jews, whether they live in Miami, California, Chicago, London, Brussels, France, Italy, their major preoccupation is building a strong Israel. That’s all they talk about, Israel.” Carmichael goes on to speak critically of Israel, which that year led the Six-Day War against several Arab countries, including Egypt, which Israel had invaded in 1956. “Egypt is Africa. Africa is ours. We never did a thing,” Carmichael says, claiming that “some of us sided with the Jews” and accusing the media of putting forward “propaganda.”

The museum also pushed back against a work that contained a racist epithet. For the exhibition, Gaines recreated several site-specific works, including a text-based mural on a black-painted wall. That work is part of a larger series, begun in the early 1990s and titled “Submerged Text: Signifiers of Race,” for which Gaines takes “an article that has nothing to do with the subject of race and I pull out words that signify race in American culture based on my experience,” he told ARTnews.

For the wall-size piece at the ICA Miami, whose text is taken from a 1992 Newsweek article, words that Gaines pulled out include “crude,” “dark,” “riot,” “assertive and loud,” and “identify their anger,” as well as the non-abbreviated form of the hip-hop group N.W.A., whose name includes the N-word. The museum wanted to alter the work, to remove the N-word from it, according to Gaines.

“I drew a line,” Gaines told ARTnews, noting that he could not “preserve” the work with that one word removed. Gaines said that Gartenfeld did not provide a clear reasoning as to why the N-word should not appear in the piece. When the exhibition opened, the piece was presented in its complete format.

“Their reasons were vague,” Gaines said. “If anybody’s going to be insulted by that word, it would be me. I put the statement in there. I don’t know why a white curator would try to monitor my sensitivity, but that’s the way I felt.”

He continued, “My personal opinion is that administration [of the ICA Miami]—not Gean [Moreno], the curator—has no idea what the work’s about. … Rather than being able to identify and recognize in its proper context in terms of the critical issues of what the work’s about, they only see the word. They have no larger narrative to contextualize it, so it immediately goes to this superficial level.”

In response to a fact-checking query, the ICA Miami confirmed that there had been discussion with Gaines about how to properly contextualize the use of a racial slur within an artwork on view. The ICA Miami declined to provide a statement to ARTnews for this article.

Gaines said that his communication with the museum continued to prove difficult. The removal of the work depicting Edward Said, part of a series that presents layered portraits of various thinkers across centuries whose work dealt with identity, was reported widely, in outlets such as Hyperallergic and the Miami New Times, but Gaines said the museum never personally told him the work had been taken away. Instead, he learned about the removal from his son, who had seen the news circulating online.

“Edward Said has had the most impact not only on my political ideas but on my artistic ideas, particularly in the way he raised the significance of language and text in informing the direction of history,” Gaines said. “He is very important to me, so on a personal level, it was particularly offensive that they removed it.”

When Gaines and his gallery, Hauser & Wirth, contacted the museum to inquire about the work’s removal, the ICA Miami confirmed that the work had been taken down. Gaines said that the museum did not provide a reasoning for the work’s removal, and confirmed on Tuesday morning that it still has not given a reason. The work was ultimately restored to the exhibition for the final two weeks of its run. (The museum did not provide a timeline for when the work was taken off view and for how long.)  

“My subjective judgment takes over, and at all indications, they removed it because Edward Said was Palestinian and pro-Palestinian,” Gaines said. “This [removal] is even greater because we talked about the earlier ones and tried to come to some compromise. But in this [case], they did it behind my back.”

He added, “[Institutions] aren’t so much interested in protecting an idea. They’re interested in protecting themselves.”

Gaines said he had not received any apology from the ICA Miami for the work’s removal without notification. Upon learning about the situation, Hauser & Wirth encouraged the museum’s senior leadership to send a formal letter of apology to Gaines. As of Tuesday morning, Gaines and Hauser & Wirth said they had received no such formal apology.

In response to a fact-checking query, the ICA Miami said that the museum had communicated with Gaines by phone and email and apologized. In an email to ARTnews, Gaines said, “I never received a formal apology for the removal of the Said portrait behind my back, which would include the reason it was removed. Had the museum included me, and demonstrated a sound reason for the request, just like in the case of the Carmichael work, I probably would have agreed to replace it, too, for the same reason.” 

The possibility of a crash in Falling Rock is a powerful opening salvo to this focused survey on one of today’s most important conceptual artists, who has long thought through the sinister ways in which the systems that structure contemporary society are too easily accepted. Moving through the other galleries, the prospect of another crash incites feelings of unease, seemingly intentionally so. Systems that become so ubiquitous and commonplace that they go unquestioned should make us uncomfortable.

On view upstairs is a work that similarly asks viewers to think about how our emotional response to violence and disaster can be manipulated. Equal parts prescient and contemplative, Airplanecrashclock, conceived in 1997 and shown a decade later as part of the main exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale, presents an airplane suspended above a cityscape that amalgamates identifiable skyscrapers from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. At intervals, the plane begins its slow descent, whose speed increases as a soundtrack of people screaming (passengers, presumably) begins to play. Then a panel in the “street” flips and the crashing plane is replaced with its wreckage. Though the work could refer to any number of aerial tragedies, that it was devised four years before 9/11, and six before the subsequent US-led invasion of Iraq, makes for a sort of haunting prophecy.

Unlike the crashes (and quiet near-misses) of Falling Rock, the eventuality seemingly foretold in Airplanecrashclock is masked by the aural quality of the third floor, which plays host to several of Gaines’s “Manifestos,” works that translate famed public speeches into musical scores. Connecting the letters A through G to their respective musical notes (with H becoming B-flat and all remaining letters becoming rests and unplayed beats), these works again mask from what they truly derive. A musically beautiful score is actually a rousing political speech Malcolm X delivered in 1965 (an excerpt: “America is a society controlled primarily by racists and segregationists. This is a society whose government doesn’t hesitate to inflict the most brutal form of punishment and oppression upon dark skinned people all over the world”).

Another draws from Taiaiake Alfred’s 1999 book, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (sample: “Indigenous people today are seeking to transcend the history of pain and loss that began with the coming of Europeans into our world. In the past 500 years, our people have suffered murderous onslaughts of greed and disease”). The speeches play on four screens nearby, scrolling over the words like a karaoke monitor. That they play over each other adds to the symphony that oscillates between harmony and dissonance.

Gaines’s exploration of language is drawn out further in works like Sky Box I (2011), a black box installation in which four excerpts from dense academic prose hang on a wall. Over the course of some 10 minutes, the lighting in the room gradually changes, and the texts—writings on colonialism and efforts to create democracies in its wake by the likes of Frantz Fanon and Léopold Sédar Senghor—become unreadable as the room darkens. Once it turns pitch-black, the panels transform into glittering constellations, and as the room brightens, the texts become legible once again. In the related series titled “Submerged Text: Signifiers of Race” (1991–2023), Gaines takes pages from other texts and redacts everything except words that can signify race (both self-identifying terms and harmful stereotypes), pointing out how commonplace and suggestive those words are as a whole.

Gaines (b. 1944) is best known for his use of the grid as an organizing device in numerous series of works he created beginning in the 1970s. Recent uses of the form are on view here, including selections from “Faces 1: Identity Politics” (2018), featuring portraits of major thinkers across history from Aristotle to Karl Marx to bell hooks. With “Identity Politics,” Gaines looks at how the language we use to describe ourselves can ultimately fail us.

“Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1” (2022) employs photographs of pecan trees on the Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina, not far from where Gaines was born. The process in both series is similar: the image is set on a grid of colorful numbered pixels, and Gaines lays images one at a time over one another. The final iteration is so dense with colors and shapes that it becomes indistinct. With the trees, he encloses it in a plexiglass box on whose surface a photographic detail of the last layered tree is printed. In this series, he acknowledges something more menacing: though slavery may have ended more than 150 years ago, the reminders of its legacy are all around.

Gaines doesn’t propose easy answers to the heady questions he’s been asking for more than 50 years. The systems that structure our society aren’t easily deconstructed, for understanding or dismantling. They are—and have always been—purposely illegible. And stopping to consider them fully might reveal more about us than we expect. All we have to do then, Gaines seems to suggest, is gently scratch the surface to learn how much we don’t know. 

Like most cities anywhere in the world, New York is rich with history. In certain areas, that history feels almost palpable, especially in a city where so much has been lost or otherwise purposefully—and violently—erased, ignored, and hidden. One aspect of New York’s past that met such a fate is how the city’s economy was built on chattel slavery. Drawing out that history and thinking about it critically is the crux of Charles Gaines’s Moving Chains, a monumental 110-foot installation that comprises a wooden structure that resembles the hull of a ship, with nine sizable chains overhead.

From its site on Governors Island, Moving Chains, which had its closing ceremony this past weekend (and which will travel to the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati next year), was located at a locus point for different histories. It looked out to Lower Manhattan, the unceded territories of the Lenape people that would be seized first by the Dutch to create their settlement, New Amsterdam, and later taken by the British to create New York. There was a slave market on Wall Street, and even after the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827, Wall Street still played an important role in the transformation of cotton into wealth. That the East River and the Hudson River meet just off Governors Island is also significant: the docks on the East River imported sugar from the Caribbean, while the Hudson connected the Eastern Seaboard with the interior of the US upon the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825.

But the view from Governors Island also represents hope with its proximity to the Statue of Liberty, which was given as a gift to the US to celebrate the final abolition of chattel slavery at the end of the Civil War. The most direct reference to this in the statue are the chains at Lady Liberty’s feet—chains that had once held her in bondage. Over the years, that history, too, has been slowly eroded, with the Statue of Liberty coming to represent the promise of freedom for immigrants arriving from Europe.

These facts and more are elucidated in a walking tour, titled River Years, made by Black Gotham Experience to accompany Moving Chains. The tour, which remains accessible on Creative Time’s website, gives a poetic and poignant telling of these stories, asking listeners to consider the ground they are on, the powerful force of the water roiling before them, and the histories of sites that can easily be forgotten or misremembered. “It’s meant to be more meditative, with pauses and considerations, versus a 25-minute Wikipedia firing hose,” Black Gotham Experience founder Kamau Ware told a group assembled for a live demonstration of River Years this past (very rainy) Sunday.

What I found most powerful about experiencing River Years and Moving Chains together, as the rain misted my face, was reflecting on the sound that the rivers made as they crashed against the rocks. As Ware pointed out, a large portion of Governors Island’s 172 acres were created with landfill. As we turned a bend around Castle Williams, with Moving Chains looming in the distance, we began walking on such an infilled portion. In the audio tour, Ware’s voice asks us to listen to how much louder the crashing sounds of the waves have become. “What if 1,000 human years equaled one river year?” he wonders about waters that have been around much longer than any human. The waters know their place—and they will stop at nothing to reclaim that history, no matter how slowly.

This interview, conducted in August 2022, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A.i.A.: How did your multipart work, The American Manifest, which the Governors Island installation Moving Chains is a part of, come together?

Charles Gaines: The project really started over eight years ago. I was asked to make a proposal for public commission for St. Louis, Missouri. They were at the time expanding their park grounds. They brought Creative Time to be the curator of the public art project. To my shock and surprise, they selected my piece. I went out to St. Louis and visited sites. At the time, director of Creative Time was Anne Pasternak, who is now director of the Brooklyn Museum. Working for her at the time as a curator was Meredith Johnson. And later, Jean Cooney joined the project. And Justine Ludwig, who is now the current director of Creative Time.

When I went out there and was looking at the site, realizing the history of the site, I came up with a project around the subject of Dred Scott. Three things at the site were notable to me. One, of course, was the Mississippi River. I should say that I didn’t go in with an intention of creating such a quietly political piece, but being there, the history of the region is so prominent. That history is framed by some pretty provocative subjects, which are memorialized there, like at the St. Louis courthouse, where the Dred Scott trials took place. And the Mississippi River was fundamental in terms of the development of agrarian capitalism—and essentially, in general, the American economy came out of that. The St. Louis Arch helped introduce the ideology of Manifest Destiny, positioning St. Louis as the gateway to the West. And to the west of St. Louis, at the time, were “unconquered” lands, so to speak.

So, I thought the centerpiece of this could be the Dred Scott case. The history of slavery becomes essential. Within the educational system in the US, the development of America and its relationship to capitalism is connected with democracy, but in a way that makes sure that our understanding of economic development was a noble enterprise—part of this general idea of progress, with America taking a lead position. But, it was not connected with the slavery, and neither was that idea of capitalism. Even though it’s so obvious, it could slap you in the face. American imperialism is taught still as a noble enterprise because it’s bringing “enlightenment” to the world, so to speak. But it was separated from the part of capitalism that deals with the idea of property. To connect them might suggest that this noble enterprise is really being driven by greed.

So, I wanted to design a piece that would try to integrate these narratives. That I would not only be doing a critique of American capitalism and American economic development but also America’s investment in slavery and a critique of Manifest Destiny and imperialism, introducing quite provocative critiques that have been obscured in the education that I got. So, Moving Chains became the lead structure in that effort to address these narratives.

I proposed that piece. Creative Time was very excited about it. We took it to St. Louis; they were very excited about it. But for some reason, St. Louis’s idea of community development collapsed, and so the whole project fell apart. This was between six and eight years ago.

How did the project resume in its current manifestation?

I have to give credit to Creative Time, because they would not let the project die. They kept in communication with me, trying to find new sites, new possibilities, and new sources of funding. There was one point when we evaluated sites [in Manhattan]. That brings up another important element, this piece is site-specific. The objects are so dependent upon the history of sites, to have resonance. It had to be located in particular sites where that history is part of the development.

When Justine [Ludwig] was hired, the project was sitting on the shelf because it had been dormant. She really loved it, and she called me and asked me if I would mind taking it up again. She started the campaign—it’s an almost $4 million project. Almost simultaneously, Jean [Cooney] took on the job as the head of Times Square Arts and Meredith [Johnson] took on the job as the head of art for the Trust for Governors Island. And they asked me to come up with a proposal for a separate project. So somehow, because I didn’t tell them, [Meredith and Jean] found out about Justine’s interest in Moving Chains, and Justine found out that they were doing a project with me. So, they all got together, and came up with the idea of collaborating around reviving Moving Chains, and that’s how it came back into being.

How do the other chapters of The American Manifest, including the installation in Times Square and the planned travel of the work to Cincinnati, relate to Moving Chains?

When Meredith, Jean, and Justine got together to collaborate, they were each thinking about how they could uniquely contribute to the project. They wanted to think through the collaboration that way, rather than it just being a singular work and putting it up in one place. They wanted to use the fact that there was a larger group to make the project bigger—not only physically, but give it a bigger, critical presence. At some point, we had to think about it more than just Moving Chains, and we had to think of a title about what the project is proposing as a critique. To come up with a concept for the project based around this critique of these three integrated narratives: this critique of American culture, particularly with how these aspects of American culture have been dealt with today. With that mind, we came up with the idea of siting the “Manifestos” in Times Square. There are some technical problems with trying to do a physical manifestation of “Manifestos” in Times Square, so Jean asked if I could come up with another idea for a site work. That’s how the installation Roots [sculptures depicting upside-down trees in Times Square during July–September 2022] came to be. We also decided that the best place for the Moving Chains structure was Governors Island because it had all of the requirements in terms of site location, that I was talking about earlier.

And then Cincinnati [where The American Manifest will travel in 2024] came into picture because Justine, who had worked in Cincinnati for years [as a curator at the Contemporary Arts Center], suggested it. I’m trying to create a structure where these individual sites are employed to showcase the contributors to the project. Cincinnati is almost identical to St. Louis in terms of the history of the role the city played not only in the narrative of slavery but also in the narrative of economic development.

One of the things that I wanted to do in integrating these separate narratives was to include the history of the Native population in terms of this idea of American expansion. St. Louis and Cincinnati were created by removing the Native population from their lands, and that excavation and removal helped with this critique that I am trying to do. If we can’t go to St. Louis, let’s go to Cincinnati.

From that, we came up with the idea to divide the presentation into parts. The first metaphor was a fugue in three parts, a musical metaphor. But, then we got into a literary and historical model by calling them chapters. So, we can reveal this whole project in chapters: Chapter One in Times Square, Chapter Two on Governors Island, and Chapter Three in Cincinnati. And that also helped with the complexity of fabrication and construction.

How did the proposal change from the original St. Louis one?

In St. Louis, we were going to the courthouse [as a backdrop]. The courthouse was going to be used as the site of the “Manifestos” performance. Manifestos 4 is a piece where I take the text of the majority and minority opinions in the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, and I convert the opinions into musical notation and write a score for an ensemble. The way I do that becomes important because the whole process is systematically determined, so that the music is translated via a set of rules of transforming letters into notes. The product of that process was to be installed in the courthouse. We were also planning a one-act opera that would be performed in one of the courtrooms. This is a mutable process. It wasn’t a matter of being disappointed when something couldn’t be done because we came up with something else that could be done.

When you read both opinions in the Dred Scott case, they are written rigorously, under the rules of legal language. There’s certain logic that they have to maintain in order to sustain a certain legitimacy. And when you read it, what they are saying is nonsense. I think in the 19th-century, it even appeared to a lot of people as nonsense. The use of language is being motivated by feelings, so if you’re anti-slavery, then you’re going to find a legal way to justify that. More often than not, that language makes no sense in relation to lived experience.

Was the concept for Moving Chains always a monumental sculptural work that resembles the hull of a ship with chains?

The only thing that changed was that in my original version the structure was 400 feet long. [Laughs.]

The intention was to show that the United States has never come to grips with its real investment in slavery—it still hasn’t. But neither American democracy nor American capitalism has ever divested itself from a general idea of Enlightenment and how Enlightenment theory has provided a model of a humanist concern for the development of wealth and the development of capitalism. There was a so much religious fervor about that desire. The United States wanted to advance itself as being motivated for the general public good in the development of these areas. This explains why America is not interested in revealing the true history of slavery because it would dismantle and reveal this myth they had about being invested in the general good. These narratives are kept separate because if they were thought to be in harmony or in sync with each other they would reveal that what is essential to American development is violence. The violence that was part of the American development has been washed away, just like slavery, or the violence has been rewritten in terms of the good guy/bad guy, humanist interest in good. In this work, I wanted to make sure that people could understand the relationship between these narratives, although separated, are actually linked together and inseparable, and, simply by doing that, to reveal those uncomfortable stories.

A lot of my work deals with the political subjects, but my interest in art is that art has to take part and contribute to the general understanding. That doesn’t necessarily mean that art has to have specific political ideas that drives it, although it could. In relationship to this piece, it is important to me, and this goes back to history of my work, that Moving Chains reveal the link in these relationships, and the reveal is done by the exposure of certain conceptual and linguistic structures that not only can explain why they were separated in the first place but also reveal why they’re linked. This is why I work in systems because I’m working on this structural level—or syntactical level in terms of language—whereby you can see how meaning is formed, and how then the formation of those meanings can take on very specific political interests.

The reason slavery and capital development are separated is because by seeing the treatment of slaves and the treatment of pigs, horses, and corn that would reveal how slavery was justified. But it would also reveal this real, serious level of violence. In other words, the commodification of the Earth and the commodification of human beings are both violent acts. They have violent consequences. The building of agrarian society doesn’t have to be done through a certain kind of laissez-faire economics. There are different kinds of economies that you can develop. But the ideological principles that govern American capitalism reside in and can be seen clearly in the way America dealt with slavery, so you can see how unique it is. The link and relationship between these parts I tried to make [visible] by showing structural resemblances between them.

I want Moving Chains to refer to more than one thing. I don’t want it to just refer to slavery; I want it also to refer to economic development. There is a system of signifiers that can link the two because of redundancies and similarities that can be seen between the narratives. For example, the chains themselves, both metaphorically and metonymically, bring up the narratives of slavery and trade. Chains are something that are a part of maritime life, used for hauling, lifting, and anchoring. But they’re also used for bondage.

In the structure, there are nine of these chains. Eight of them are aluminum, and one is a kind of rusted red. The silver chains move at the current of the river, and the red one moves at the speed of the vessels that traverse the rivers, moving trade around. We actually had to reduce those speeds because rivers move at 2.2 knots, and the speed of vessels are like 4.5– 4.7 knots. When you walk into it, you enter a really kind of intimidating space where these chains are above your head, and you can see them and you can hear them. They make this sound of what it sounds like to be in the hull of a wooden ship. But it also feels like you’re in the hull of a slave ship. So through analogy, we’ve tried to link these separate narratives, which is the personal intention that I have in the formal critique of this work.

Would you say that’s the system that has created the work?

That’s such a super question. My investment in art is to make a rule-based process to substitute my subjectivity being the driving factor. In the “Grid” works, you could see how the system works. It’s just a plotting and mapping system. But in the language pieces, it’s a little bit more mysterious. I don’t think it’s abstract. When we think of systems, we think of numbers. But we don’t think of systems when we think of structures. Structures are systems—it’s embedded in the word. What I’m using is language. So, the issue is that I’m not saying, “Here are some chains, and it creates this horrible experience, and that’s a critique of slavery.” What I’m saying is I can contribute to our general knowledge about the United States treats these narratives and how to reveal obscured parts of these narratives, simply by articulating through metaphors and metonyms. I don’t do anything directly. The chain is not a chain that you use for hauling or lifting or bondage. The chains become this tool for metaphor and metonym. By revealing the underlying structure of any cultural construction—a concept or an idea—by revealing how it’s constituted structurally or linguistically. In the linguistic mapping, you can make analogies. And that allows you, then, to link things that are otherwise separated. What I’m saying is that I didn’t make a slave ship—I made a structure, even if it looks like a ship.

Can you say more about how the “Grid” works and Moving Chains are conceptually related?

They’re related because they’re both systems. It’s interesting because the “Grid” works, there’s nothing mysterious about them. They can be easily perceived, but they run into this problem with people’s fear of numbers and systems. They think there’s a secret, hidden meaning. People are always going after meaning, which is great because I want them to go after meaning. But, they think that their ability to understand is made complicated by the fact that it’s high math. I mean, it’s this phobia. Some of the most sophisticated things I know have yelled at me for that reason. The only way I can rationalize it is that there’s still this process going on in art, particularly in the disrespectful way first- and second-generation Conceptualism is being treated by history. There is this attempt to erase Conceptualism out of the historical narrative because people think that Conceptual art is boring. That’s because it deals with words, and it deals with numbers, and it can have this sort of anti-aesthetic property. So, when they see numbers, they think it’s there not to give access to those experiences, but to obscure, to cloud itself, or to embrace boredom as an empowering gesture. It drives me nuts. Just as the United States, in general, has not come to terms with history of slavery, art hasn’t come to terms with its uncritical embrace of aesthetics.

I have an interest in my practice in critiquing representation. Through my critique of representation, I wanted to critique the idea of aesthetics. What I wanted to do was show how aesthetics rather than the modernist idea that the aesthetic experience is an experience that’s not informed by our cultural knowledge and that it’s universal. Rather than say that, I wanted to say that aesthetics is culturally determined. The feeling that we call an aesthetic feeling is culturally determined, and it’s also politically determined. As you watch how tastes change over time, I don’t know how you can avoid that.

What we critique are ideas. When you do a math problem, for example, you’re not involved in the critique. It’s just a tool. So, the making of my work is supposed to be like that—it’s playing out a math problem. Because of something that I do, you begin to question what it means to you, then that’s where the critique can happen.

Moving Chains is billed as your first public artwork. I’m curious why you waited so long to make a public artwork.

I wasn’t waiting. [Laughs.] This raises another issue that reflects my life and how I’ve been treated as a Black artist. Race is still an issue in the art world today. How it’s being played out in the narrative is different from the way it was 20, 30 years ago. But race has always been a complicating factor in an art world with a diverse structure. In the early days, Black artists just weren’t getting shown, just like women artists, or women artists were relegated to also-rans. I got out of art school in 1968, and my exhibition career started in the early ’70s. Racism has been a factor in everything I know about, so it’s been a factor in my life. It factors in in different ways, the same way with everybody. But ultimately, it was about getting access. I entered the art world at the time that the first generation of Conceptual art was reaching a kind of a populace, but before the begetting of a second generation of Conceptual art. I was between Sol LeWitt and Lorna Simpson, so as a consequence, I didn’t get the benefit of this interest in minority representation that happened in the mid- to late ’80s. On the one hand, I was being associated with first generation of Conceptual art, but then on the other hand, I was living in the art world as a Black person, so I wasn’t being properly represented by my galleries. It took me a long time to admit that. I started showing with Leo Castelli and John Weber in the ’70s. But I know that they weren’t fully representing me, putting the full power of the gallery behind me. I was sort of like the backroom artist. I just failed at getting the profile and never got to this point, even though I was showing internationally—nobody knew who I was. So nobody’s going to come and ask me to do a commission.

Then there was a period were I completely erased for about 15 years erased. Even though I was having exhibitions, my work didn’t become the favorite of certain collectors—that art world career stuff. I still today think it’s poisonous to start thinking about that stuff in the studio. But, at the interest of revealing what was at stake for minority artists during that time, I went through a period of 15 or 20 years without selling one single work of art, but I was working all the time. That started to change around 2007, when I was in the Venice Biennale. The attention today is as mystifying to me today as the lack of attention was mystifying in the past. I think with Hauser & Wirth, this is the first time I have the full weight of the gallery behind me. Now, I’m working on four public commissions.

Across the world this year, artists continued exploring the ways that racism, colonialism, and misogyny shape society, and they did so as vitally as ever. Their work offered powerful views into alternate universes devoid of these poisonous prejudices while also staring down realities that must be contended with.

Along the way, it became obvious that the study of art history must change too. Artists of color and women artists who had been dealing with these topics for decades were suddenly seen anew, and the works they produced seemed ever more notable. With the understanding that nothing is fixed, experts also upended past conceptions about famous works, even at one point discovering that a beloved abstraction had been hanging upside-down for years.

To look back on the past 12 months in art-making, below is a survey of some of the most important artworks made or presented in a new light in 2022.

In the early 1990s, I had my biggest recruitment disappointment: losing Kara Walker to the Rhode Island School of Design. I don’t know if she would ultimately have attended CalArts, but because we did not have competitive scholarships, we took ourselves out of the running. Had we provided help, we could easily have diversified the program many years ago. So earlier this year, colleagues and I created a limited program to begin fundraising for a larger program dedicated to bringing in Black and Latinx graduate students.

At CalArts, lack of diversity is a serious problem. When I began teaching there in 1989, two Black students could be counted in the graduate program of about 45. During my time at the school, the number of MFA graduates who self-identified as Black is just 35. It’s notable how many of the few Black students we have taught went on to have important careers, among them Lyle Ashton Harris, Gary Simmons, Henry Taylor, Mark Bradford, Rodney McMillian, Kira Lynn Harris, Lauren Halsey, and Edgar Arceneaux. They overperformed in relation to their white peers and diversified the art world to a greater extent than I could possibly have predicted.

Sadly, for me, the imbalance I encountered at CalArts represented my lived experience as a Black person in America. Because of hindrances I experienced as a young person, I learned early on that I lived in a country made up of two societies, one privileged (white) and the other underprivileged (people of color). Life in America for Blacks was a never-ending struggle for equal access; entrenched racism informed my expectations. Although the imbalance I saw wasn’t surprising, I never lost the feeling that it was wrong.

Charles Gaines.

I was born during the Jim Crow era of legalized discrimination and experienced the subsequent social changes created by the civil rights movement. I saw racial separateness shift from a de jure to a de facto system of discriminatory practices. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, America became very accomplished at preserving practices that discriminated against Black people without relying on laws. This was aided by an interpretation of the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment, that disabled the idea of racial equality by setting the rights of one group against the rights of another. This allowed forms of segregation that were immune to laws prohibiting discrimination. For example, the Supreme Court in 2007 advanced an interpretation of equal protection that allowed for segregated schools if those schools were not intentionally segregated. In the decision for this case, which challenged race-conscious desegregation plans, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “Where segregation is created in a de facto manner (not created by government policy), it would violate the Constitution to take racially explicit steps to reverse it.” The principle was that equality cannot be enforced by removing the rights of one group for the sake of another. This ruling did not recognize the concept of institutional racism or the fact that institutional racism is itself a product of human intention.

Founded in 1961, CalArts, like almost all schools, was and still is segregated. The argument I have heard over and over in my quest to create diversity was that, if benefits were given to one group at the expense of another, equal protection would effectively be denied. The problem with this interpretation of the Bill of Rights is that it protects practices that are discriminatory by setting up policies that institutionalize segregation and render illegal policy solutions that are designed to desegregate—such as race-conscious distribution of scholarships.

Proving intent is difficult in a culture that has normalized white supremacy. White supremacy exists where there are individuals and institutions that privilege white people, de facto or de jure. Institutional racism is a tool of white supremacy. Accordingly, de facto discrimination is ironically protected by equal protection laws. Critiques of white supremacy allow us to identify institutionally racist practices, but it is difficult to demonstrate to whites that institutional culture protective of discriminatory practices against Blacks is inherently white supremacist—and that one’s support of those practices is in fact evidence of racist intent.

Charles Gaines teaching at CalArts in 1992.

I deal daily with white supremacy—the belief in the natural superiority of the white race—mostly through institutional racism. Many whites believe that there are more options available for Blacks to overcome underrepresentation than actually exist, that what happens to a Black person is a result of personal choices. Here is how that belief manifested itself in my struggle to create minority scholarships: the need for financial assistance for minorities was obvious to liberal-minded people, and I received a lot of verbal support for my efforts over the years—but I received no money. And not only no money, but no interest in even trying to raise money.

There were a couple of reasons for this. The first was the fear of reverse discrimination as defined by the Supreme Court: that if you are to have race-based solutions, you need to prove that they would benefit not just Blacks but all of society. (I have never understood why “the benefit of all” has to be a legal standard, except as a backstop to protect white people if Black people suddenly assumed power.) Furthermore, many people continued to believe in an inverse relationship between the percentage of minority students in an art program and its standards: any increase on that 10 or 15 percent would be considered a sign of a lowering standard.

Kids gaze through glass windows in the 2019 MASS MoCA exhibition “We Already Have What We Need” by Cauleen Smith, who helped seed change at CalArts when she began teaching there in 2018.

When I created the fellowship program for CalArts, I was inspired by artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, who joined our faculty almost two years ago with a personal mandate to create a minority scholarship. (Before she came on, I was joined in this by other faculty such as Sam Durant and Matthew Shenoda, now at RISD.) Smith took up the mantle and worked very hard at it, discovering the same resistance that I had experienced. Her diligence challenged me. I collaborated with her to create a proposal where I would fund the program directly for two years, but with the caveat that CalArts would find matching funds.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, we began to see considerable support after years of inaction. Ravi Rajan, who became CalArts president in 2017, took the unusual step to use his office to spearhead support. Art collectors Jill and Peter Kraus immediately stepped forward with matching funds (Jill is a CalArts board member), and that was followed closely by a major matching contribution from David Kordansky, whose namesake gallery in Los Angeles has undertaken its own project of diversification. (Kordansky was one of my students and mentees at CalArts.) Because of this list of supporters, we are now able to provide at least four scholarships over two years—as part of what the school decided to officially name the Charles Gaines Fellowship. In addition, we are seeing success in our effort to make the fellowship program permanent by creating an endowment.

The present political moment is playing a major part in our ability to find support. There is increased recognition that white supremacy and institutional racism exist as destructive forces in our society, and I have to credit the work of activist movements like Black Lives Matter, Color of Change, and the Equal Justice initiative—to name just a few—for the work they have done in raising awareness. But I am not naive enough to think that white supremacy has become an anachronism, especially in the art world. The resistance to diversification is alive, as institutions like schools and museums mishandle one social conflict after another. All we can do is continue to take steps, however small, in the right direction.

A version of this article appears in the February/March issue of ARTnews, under the title “Diversifying the Academy.”

Charles Gaines.

KATIE MILLER/COURTESY HAUSER & WIRTH

Charles Gaines has left Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects for worldwide representation by Hauser & Wirth, which has locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Hong Kong as well as Zurich and Gstaad in Switzerland and Somerset, England. Gaines will retain representation by Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin.

The subject of a survey show titled “Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989” at New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem in 2014 and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles the following year, Gaines lives and works in L.A., where he also teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Gaines’s work tends toward analytical grids and systemizations of sound. His most recent show at Paula Cooper, which ran this past May into June, featured a new series of portraits of historic thinkers distilled down to data points on pixellated grids and layered atop one another in a sequence of wall works, such that the arrangement doubled as a sort of intellectual history starting with Aristotle and including Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Malcolm X, bell hooks, and others under the collective title “Faces 1: Identity Politics.” Another work in the same show translated speeches by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. into musical notation that was performed by an orchestra for a recording that was played through speakers.

Charles Gaines, Numbers and Trees: Central Park Series IV: Tree #7, Maria, 2017, at ICA Miami.

COURTESY ICA MIAMI

Another work of his, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami features gridded abstractions of pictures of trees in New York’s Central Park. “I use systems in order to provoke the issues around representation,” Gaines once said of such work.

Earlier this year, Gaines curated “Terry Adkins: The Smooth, The Cut, and The Assembled” at Lévy Gorvy gallery in New York, in tribute to the late sound-sculptor, and as noted by ARTnews this spring, he is at work with the writer and poet Fred Moten on an opera about Dred Scott, the enslaved African-American man who sued for his freedom in 1857.

In a statement, Marc Payot, a director at Hauser & Wirth, said, “Charles Gaines’ position in the evolution of conceptual art and the emergence of the Los Angeles art scene have very special resonance in the context of our program. From the 1970s, he was one of the few African-American conceptual artists to focus on abstraction and aesthetics as means to explore ideas about perception, objectivity, and relationships. His influence is deep and profound. And his work connects in provocative ways to that of such seemingly disparate fellow artists as Jack Whitten, Larry Bell, Zoe Leonard, and Mark Bradford. As we continue to explore critical bridges between generations, deepen our commitment to women artists and artists of color, and introduce artists to new and more diverse audiences internationally, it’s an honor to welcome Charles to our Hauser & Wirth family.”

Gaines’s first show with his new gallery will be sometime next year in Los Angeles.

“Terry Adkins: The Smooth, the Cut, and the Assembled” brought together seventeen works dating from 1986 to 2013. Guest-curated by conceptual artist Charles Gaines, Adkins’s friend and sometime collaborator, the installation prioritized formal affinities and conceptual linkages. Works on the gallery’s first floor bore circular forms and allusions to music. A metal hoop stretched with fabric and mounted perpendicular to the wall, Synapse (1992), had a drumlike quality, its percussive potential underscored by a nearby work, Horus (1986), that comprised a rawhide circle displaying what appeared to be the impression of a mallet. A mound of cymbals, Native Son (Circus), 2006/15, hovered just above the floor and erupted in cacophonous blasts at predetermined but irregular intervals.

Adkins often abstractly referred to historical and cultural figures from the African diaspora in his work. Columbia (2007), for instance, is a circular piece of wood painted with as many layers of black enamel as LPs that blues singer Bessie Smith released on Columbia Records, while Bessie Smith Head, Red (2007) is a blood-red blown-glass sculpture whose balloonlike bulges evoke the form of a head and seem poised to deflate like lungs.

Upstairs, the presentation focused on the theme of doubling, showing how Adkins’s works not only echo one another but also contain echoes within themselves. Akhenaten (2013) features two plaster busts of the eponymous Egyptian pharaoh staring at each other from opposite ends of a horizontal vitrine. In Darkwater Record (2003–08), a bust of Mao Zedong sits atop a stack of cassette players that each bear two audio meters whose needles jump around to the shifting cadence of W.E.B. Du Bois delivering the speech “Socialism and the American Negro.” Yet the speech is inaudible, as no speakers are plugged into the tape decks. The work demonstrates how Adkins wanted to tune his viewers in to alternate histories and to a perceptive realm that might lurk just below everyday experience.

The exhibition was handsome, but at times almost aseptic, without much attention given to Adkins’s performances, such as his efforts with the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, which he founded in Zurich in 1986. Two five-and-a-half-foot saws were encased in a wall-mounted acrylic box like relics, for instance, and it was left to a short video clip playing on a small monitor in the stairwell to show that they were used to cut a block of ice in a performance work, Firmament, that Adkins staged at the Bronx River Art Center in 2005. Rather than vitrine-bound sculptures, the objects were meant to be expressive tools activated through use. The performative and collaborative sensibility that animated so much of Adkins’s work felt, unfortunately, just beyond the show’s reach.

Carolyn Lazard, Consensual Healing, 2018, video. Shoot the Lobster.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SHOOT THE LOBSTER

MONDAY, APRIL 30

Memorial: Tim Rollins at School of Visual Arts
This event will convene artists, collaborators, and art historians in celebration of the life of Tim Rollins, an artist and activist who died late last year at age 62. One of the founders of the collective Group Material, Rollins is best known for his collaborations with Kids of Survival (K.O.S.), a group that originated during the artist’s time teaching at Intermediate School 52 in New York’s South Bronx neighborhood in the 1980s. He spent much of his career working to create a more accessible and inclusive form of art-making—a topic that is sure to be addressed at this event at the artist’s alma mater.
School of Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, 6:30 p.m.

TUESDAY, MAY 1

Arca will perform during “A Prelude to the Shed.”

©2016 DELANEY TEICHLER

Performances: “A Prelude to the Shed” at the Shed
Ahead of its opening next spring, the Shed, a forthcoming interdisciplinary performance and exhibition space, will present “A Prelude to the Shed,” 12 days of free art events starting this week. One block away from the Shed’s future home, the event series will be staged in a temporary structure designed by Kunlé Adeyemi and Tino Sehgal, and will feature D.R.E.A.M. dance battles, Asad Raza’s class-cum-artwork Schema for a School, choreography by William Forsythe, and concerts by ABRA, Arca, and Azealia Banks. Additionally, programming will include panel discussions organized by Berlin Dorothea von Hantelmann, a professor of art and society at Bard College; Hans Ulrich Obrist, senior program adviser at the Shed; and Kevin Slavin, the Shed’s chief science and technology officer.
The Shed, West 31st Street and 10th Avenue, various times, consult the Shed’s website for more information

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2

Opening: Charles Ray at Matthew Marks
Charles Ray, whose work is currently featured in the Met Breuer’s exhibition “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300-Now),” is known for his sculptures of human and animals that sometimes feel like revisions of ancient Greek and Roman works, thanks to their strange, seductive forms. A new show at Matthew Marks, “three rooms and a repair annex,” will showcase five new sculptures by the artist. Ray has divided Marks’s larger gallery, at 522 West 22nd Street, into three spaces, each featuring one sculpture—Reclining Woman (2018), Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2017), and A copy of ten marble fragments of the Great Eleusinian Relief (2017). At 526 West 22nd Street, the small-scale sculptures Mechanic 1 and Mechanic 2 (2018), both of them stainless steel pieces finished with white matte paint, will be on view.
Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 and 526 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, MAY 3

Book Release: Whitewalling: Art, Race, & Protest in 3 Acts at Brooklyn Museum
Hannah Black’s open letter to the Whitney Museum regarding Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, which featured an image of Emmett Till’s funeral, may be the most notable example of protest in the art world in recent memory. But, as Aruna D’Souza’s new book Whitewalling: Art, Race, & Protest in 3 Acts makes clear, it is part of a larger lineage that includes events staged in reaction to programming at Artists Space and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in past decades. D’Souza, an ARTnews contributor, will read part of her book at this event, which also includes a conversation with artists Devin Kenny and Lorraine O’Grady, as well as a Q&A moderated by Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art senior curator Catherine Morris.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 7–9 p.m. Tickets free with RSVP

Wong Ping, Who’s the Daddy, 2017, animated color video, with sound. “One Hand Clapping” at the Guggenheim Museum.

©WONG PING/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND EDOUARD MALINGUE GALLERY

FRIDAY, MAY 4

Exhibition: “One Hand Clapping” at Guggenheim Museum
The latest installment in the Guggenheim’s ongoing Chinese art initiative, “One Hand Clapping” will feature new commissions by Cao Fei, Duan Jianyu, Lin Yilin, Wong Ping, and Samson Young. Working in traditional and new mediums that range from oil paint to VR, the five artists examine systems of exchange and communication, as well as the world’s uncertain future. The exhibition takes its name from a Zen Buddhist riddle: “We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:45 p.m.

Opening: Charles Gaines at Paula Cooper Gallery
A series of twelve new large-scale works by Charles Gaines will be on view at this exhibition. “Faces 1: Identity Politics” marks the artist’s return to his “Faces” series, originally begun during the late 1970s. The newest iteration in the series is a group of portraits of distinguished thinkers on identity, with figures such as Aristotle, Maria W. Stewart, Karl Marx, and bell hooks painted on gridded clear acrylic panels. Continuing his investigation of how meaning is manifested via images and language, Gaines created Manifestos 3, an addition to his earlier series of musical scores. This new work draws on a James Baldwin essay and a speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr.; Gaines translated the letters of their words into corresponding musical notes. Two large graphite drawings of the transcription and a broadcast of the performed score will be presented in the exhibition.
Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, 6–8 p.m.

Installation view of “Liz Deschenes: Rates (Frames per Second),” 2018, at Miguel Abreu Gallery.

STEPHEN FAUGHT/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MIGUEL ABREU GALLERY, NEW YORK

Opening: Liz Deschenes at Miguel Abreu Gallery
Building on her previous work, “Rates (Frames per Second)” continues Liz Deschenes’s line of inquiry around the history of image production and the ways viewers perceive photographic images. For her fourth solo exhibition with Miguel Abreu, Deschenes has taken inspiration from Étienne-Jules Marey, a 19th-century scientist and chronophotographer. At the gallery’s Eldridge Street location, equally spaced strips of silver-toned photograms will line the walls; at the Orchard Street location, a series of photograms, each corresponding to the various speeds at which people walk, will be on view.
Miguel Abreu Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street and 36 Orchard Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Arthur Jafa at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
For his first New York outing since the debut of his video Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, Arthur Jafa will take over Gavin Brown’s Harlem space. Included here will be a new video, A Kingdom Come, which focuses on the aesthetics and ritualistic qualities of black Christian worship, as well as the sculpture Big Wheels, which is made with seven-foot truck tires and continues Jafa’s fascination with American demolition derby and monster truck culture. Like much of Jafa’s work, these pieces are about the complicated nature of African-American identity.
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 439 West 127th Street, 6 p.m.

SATURDAY, MAY 5

Virginia Overton, Untitled (Dynamo), 2018, acrylic, wood, generator, and steel.

COURTESY THE ARTIST, SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK, WHITE CUBE, AND BORTOLAMI GALLERY

Opening: Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard at Shoot the Lobster
This collaborative exhibition between the Philadelphia-based artist Carolyn Lazard and Juliana Huxtable, from New York, is partly inspired by Bloodchild, a short story by the seminal African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler in which the narrator assumes the role of black female slaves in America. Details are scant in advance of the show, titled “epigenetic,”  but it promises to be a spirited affair.
Shoot the Lobster, 138 Eldridge Street, 6–8 p.m.

SUNDAY, MAY 6

Exhibition: Virginia Overton at Socrates Sculpture Park
For her show of newly commissioned works, Virginia Overton has created a sculpture that spans 40 feet and takes the shape of a crystal. Made out of architectural truss systems and iron, the massive structure refers to industrial objects and is meant to address the role labor plays in today’s economy. Also on view will be a work that adds a reflective glass bead surface to a 1990 Ford F250 pickup truck. Like much of Overton’s work, the pieces were crafted with the space in mind, both physically and conceptually—they are site-specific in more sense than one.
Socrates Sculpture Park, 32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Queens, 9 a.m.–sundown