Conceptual artist Charles Gaines is both humbled and grateful to be the 60th recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal.
“It’s still hard for me to imagine,” Gaines said in a recent phone interview. “Even though I’ve known about it for months, it’s hard for me to imagine myself in the list of people that they have honored over the years. I’ll try my very best and express my thanks when I’m there, but there is a little part of me that is in the back of my head that will be saying ‘What are you doing here?’”
The MacDowell Colony plans to present Gaines with the MacDowell Medal on Sunday, inducting Gaines into the select group of MacDowell Medal recipients that includes Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copland, Robert Frost, Georgia O’Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Stephen Sondheim, Kiki Smith, Toni Morrison, David Lynch and Art Spiegelman.
The 112-year-old artist colony has awarded the medal annually since 1960 to artists who have “made an outstanding contribution to American culture.”
Gaines has been “a leading figure in the conceptual art movement on the West Coast for more than 40 years,” according to Ann Philbin, Medalist Selection Panel chair and director of The Hammer Museum at UCLA. “His influence as an artist is exponentially enhanced by his legacy as an educator, helping generations of students find their artistic voices since the 1970s.”
Gaines was born in Charlestown, South Carolina.
“When I was a kid I had some drawing talent,” Gaines said, and like most children that show talent in art, he was encouraged.
This led to Gaines attending Arts High School in Newark, New Jersey, the first public high school for the arts in the country.
He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts from Jersey City State College and then a Master of Fine Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, School of Art and Design in Rochester, New York. It was when he attended the Rochester Institute of Technology that he first began to consider a career as an artist, but he was torn.
“I was making paintings and I wasn’t really happy about the whole process,” he said. “I enjoyed making art, I enjoyed making work,” but the process didn’t seem meaningful to him. Artists from Western countries are trained to be expressive, he said, however, “I was not interested in the act of expression.”
While at the Rochester Institute of Technology he discovered critical thinking, theory and philosophy and other practices used in non-Western art. “And I saw there was other ideas and strategies of art-making.” He became interested in Tantric Buddhist art practices. “I was particularly taken by some of their cosmological drawings. … At the same time I started listening to the music of minimalist composers like Steve Reich.”
This led Gaines onto the path of becoming a conceptual artist, a movement that was started by artists in the 1960s.
“I wasn’t interested in making art that way, exploring my imagination and intuition … I didn’t want to make work that way,” Gaines said. “I wanted to demonstrate that you could have that relationship with a piece of art without that art being created by a piece of imagination. … And still people can respond to it critically and aesthetically.”
In conceptual art, process and theory trump aesthetics and self-expression.
“The 60s conceptual artists rejected painting and sculpture,” Gaines said. “It’s kind of avant-garde or radical. It was a critique of art itself as a political gesture.”
Gaines wanted to expand the idea of art and undermine the long-standing idea that art could only be made through subjective practices and not by objective practices, systems and ways of thinking. But unlike the original group of conceptual artists that came before him, who used objects and other means to create art, Gaines used traditional art mediums such as painting, drawing and sculpting.
Gaines fell between the 1960s conceptual artists and the conceptual or post-modern artists of the 1980s.
“I was tagged as a conceptual artist in those days,” Gaines said. “I was sort of in-between so people kind of tagged me as a bridge between the first and second generation.”
From 1973 and 1974 he created a series called “Regression” 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,” according to the MacDowell Colony, “He quickly became a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art with a body of work engaging formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and subjective realms.”
“I started with a simple mathematical equation … and then I plot it out on a piece of paper,” he said.
Despite his systems-based approach, Gaines said the results can be unpredictable. “As I make work I am constantly surprised by what I make from it,” he said.
Gaines said he strives to use his art to show the relationship between a system itself and the object it creates. And in doing so reflects how systems within society can produce a belief, social construct or a language. Gaines said he wants his art to reveal the truth about these systems within our society to dispel the notion that something like racism, as an example, stems from the truth when it really stems from a system within society.
He has lived and worked in Los Angeles, California for more than 40 years. He is a member of the CalArts School of Art faculty. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally. His work has been prominently displayed in major collections including at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
While Gaines has never been to the MacDowell Colony, he said it’s reputation proceeds it.
“It’s been a very important part of the development of American art. You can see that not only in the list of MacDowell Medal winners, but also in the list of people who were residents,” Gaines said. “It’s humbling. It’s very significant. …. It made it possible for (these artists) to focus on their work and not having them broken with having to deal with things in their daily life. It must have contributed to helping produce very important art. I can’t praise it too much. It’s a very humbling idea.”
The Medal Day ceremony is planned to take place on the grounds of the MacDowell Colony, 100 High Street in Peterborough, on Sunday at 12:15 p.m.
Medal Day is the one day of the year that the Colony is open to the public.
Open studios tours to be hosted by MacDowell artists-in-residence begin at 2 p.m. and end at 5 p.m. Guests are invited to enjoy picnic lunches on MacDowell’s grounds. The event is free and open to the public.
For more information go online to www.macdowellcolony.org.