The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism
The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism
A Conversation between Charles Gaines and Huey Copeland
February 15 @ Artbook PS1
🗓️ Saturday, February 15, 2024, 4–6 p.m.
📍 Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City NY 11101
Please 🔗 RSVP here
Please join us for a conversation between Charles Gaines and Huey Copeland, moderated by book editor Rhea Anastas, about the publication The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism.
In 1993, at the University of California, Irvine, Charles Gaines and Catherine Lord mounted The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, a category-breaking exhibition of Black artists from different generations, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Green, David Hammons, Ben Patterson, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat Ward Willams, and Fred Wilson. Challenging the racializing of Black artists’ work, the experimental exhibition confronted the discourse around race difference in the United States by including excerpts of writing by art critics alongside Gaines’s research on the reception of the exhibition’s artists in a reading room.
The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, released by Dancing Foxes Press, with Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and The Brick, Los Angeles, reprints in facsimile the eponymous 1993 publication that documented the show; original essays by Gaines, Lord, and Maurice Berger and the transcript of a roundtable conversation among a range of artists and writers confront and build on the exhibition’s revelations. Reproducing images of the exhibition for the first time in color, the new edition augments the original publication with an essay by poet and scholar Fred Moten; recent conversations between Lord and Gaines and between Moten and Gaines; new artists’ statements moderated and edited by Thomas Lax and Jamillah James; and an afterword by Rhea Anastas.
A Q&A and book signing will follow the conversation.
Charles Gaines, a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create a series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today. Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles. He was on faculty at CalArts for over 30 years and established a fellowship to provide critical scholarship support for Black students in the M.F.A. program. Gaines has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and around the world, most notably at Dia Beacon, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Huey Copeland, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, interrogates African/Diasporic, American and European artistic praxis from the late 18th-century to the present with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. In his interdisciplinary research, Copeland focuses on the intersections of race and gender, subject and object, the aesthetic and its others from a black feminist perspective that reveals the biases and elisions of the discipline. An editor of OCTOBER and a former contributing editor of Artforum, Copeland has published in numerous periodicals as well as in international exhibition catalogues and essay collections. Alongside his work as a teacher, critic, editor, scholar, and administrator, Copeland has co-curated exhibitions such as Interstellar Low Ways (with Anthony Elms), and co-organized international conferences like “Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics” (with Sampada Aranke).
