Copublished with Dancing Foxes Press, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and The Brick, LA
With contributions by: Kemi Adeyemi, Hilton Als, Rhea Anastas, Maurice Berger, Charles Gaines, Malik Gaines, Thelma Golden, Jamillah James, Steffani Jemison, Thomas Lax, Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, Catherine Lord, Ben Patterson, Will Rawls, Cameron Rowland, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Cauleen Smith, Pat Ward Williams
Edited by Rhea Anastas, Charles Gaines, Jamillah James, and Eric Golo Stone
Design by Scott Ponik, with original edition designed by Susan Silton
184 pages, 40 images, softcover with jacket, 8 1/2 x 11 inches
$40
The Theater of Refusal:
Black Art and Mainstream Criticism 2024
A Roundtable Discussion & LA Book Launch
Thursday, March 6, 2025
6:30 PM
The Brick, 518 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles
Free
Please join us for a roundtable on the occasion of the LA launch of the publication The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism 2024. The Brick Director Hamza Walker will moderate a discussion with Dr. LeRonn Brooks, Charles Gaines, and Catherine Lord.
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, Adrian Piper, 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 2024, 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 discussion. Books will be available on site or can be ordered from the Dancing Foxes website.
Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks is the Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Founded in 1985, the GRI is dedicated to advancing the understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through active collecting and public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs. Dr. Brooks is a specialist in African American art, poetics, performance, and Africana Studies. His interviews, essays on African American art, and poetry have appeared in publications for Bomb Magazine, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Spelman Museum of Art, Callaloo Journal, The International Review of African American Art as well as The Aperture Foundation, among others. As the lead curator for the Getty's new African American Art History Initiative, he is charged with building and developing collections to promote advanced research in the study of African American art history.
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.
Born in Roseau, Dominica, Catherine Lord, Professor Emerita of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine, is a writer, artist, and curator whose work addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism. She has also served as Dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts and has taught at Harvard College, Goddard College, and SUNY Purchase. Her texts have been widely anthologized and published. She is the author of The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation and the co-author (with Richard Meyer) of Art and Queer Culture. Her most recent book, The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, was published by no place press in 2023. She has been shown at Site Santa Fe, La Mama Gallery, Post Gallery, Thomas Jancar Gallery, Callicoon Gallery, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and the Carpenter Center. She divides her time between Hudson, N.Y. and Manhattan.
This book and event was made possible with generous support from Galerie Max Hetzler; Hauser & Wirth; the Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Allison and Bennett Rosenthal; and the Teiger Foundation Director’s Award.