This summer,
The Studio Museum in Harlem presents Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989, the first museum survey of the Los Angeles–based conceptual artist’s early work. On view from July 17–October 29, 2014, the exhibition features seventy-five works from the beginning of a singular career that now spans four decades. Highly regarded as both a leading practitioner of conceptualism and an influential educator at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Charles Gaines is celebrated primarily for his photographs, drawings and works on paper that investigate systems, cognition and language. His early experiments examined the roles that systems and rule-based procedures play in the construction of forms, objects and meaning. Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 traces Gaines’s career, from his groundbreaking work in the 1970s—some of which debuted
