The artist Charles Gaines, his beauty and poignance

Trees bloom cherry-blossom pink, teal and yellow as artist Charles Gaines walks through Hauser & Wirth’s West Hollywood gallery. Up close, his large, gridded paintings look like clusters of pixelated squares. Zoom out and these pointillist patterns are colorful doubles of the black-and-white photographs of baobab trees mounted in the foreground. These latest works from Gaines’ ongoing “Numbers and Trees” series chart seemingly endless possibilities — and the artist’s own trajectory.

Dressed in a crisp, dark monochrome coat and slacks, Gaines makes his way to a small office in the back of the gallery and takes a seat next to me. It’s raining out, we are two months into the new presidency and government rollbacks — including DEI initiatives — are underway, and Los Angeles is still reeling from the historic fires that wiped out swaths of the Palisades and Altadena. “I’ve never lived in a decade that wasn’t entirely problematic,” says Gaines, when I ask him what he makes of the present.

At 80, Gaines has eyes that are clear and discerning, his generous and direct demeanor giving away his decades-long experience as an educator. He has lived through enough to see that the American notion of progress is a myth — this idea that constant work at improving the world will eventually pay off. “I never believed in that,” he says. “With each decade of my existence as an artist, the world was always in deep trouble.”

The way Gaines sees it, some aspects have gotten better: “It is easier to make a living as a minority artist now.” While others have mutated or stayed the same. “Has it reached a moment in society where you can say it’s postracial? Are women finally treated equally? I can’t say that that’s the case,” says Gaines. When power is embedded in social structures, no matter what changes happen within, the framework of oppression remains. “Sometimes it looks like progress, but you open a front door and you find out the back door got shut behind you and you didn’t even notice it.”

The beauty and poignance of Gaines’ practice lies in his ability to form entirely new, generative structures — a mindset with profound implications beyond art-making. “I came into being an artist at a time where there was an incredibly racist art world, but it was the only world that we knew about, so it was not like a regression like you’re feeling today,” Gaines tells me, pausing. “So the application is, how do you make things better?”

Rather than generalize or hold on to false hopes of a utopia, Gaines looks to his immediate surroundings here in Los Angeles, where his impact on the art scene is tangible. As a professor at California Institute of the Arts from 1989 until 2022, the artist made it his mission to bring more minority students into the classrooms. “The schools were as highly segregated as any other part of the institutional framework,” he says.

Set on changing this, Gaines decided to create a scholarship program, which proved to be an uphill battle: While CalArts was gaining national recognition, few believed minority scholarships would benefit its long-term success. “Nobody thought it was worth the effort,” he says. Still, a number of notable students passed through Gaines’ classroom, such as Mark Bradford, Lyle Ashton Harris, Rodney McMillian, Henry Taylor and Lauren Halsey. “There is this quality in someone, where their abilities match up with certain things that they want to do,” says Gaines of Halsey, who had switched over to art school from architecture. As he watched the young artist make her way to Yale and then gallery representation, Gaines wasn’t surprised at her swift success. “There are situations where somebody who deserves that kind of attention doesn’t get it — that surprises me,” he says. “With her, people saw the same thing I saw.”

Still, for the next two-plus decades, Gaines says he only encountered about one Black student and a couple of Latinos per graduating class — whereas his mission was to see at least 10% people of color in the program to reflect the population. “We didn’t get very far for a while,” he says matter-of-factly. “But you didn’t give up,” I offer. “No, I didn’t.”

More than three decades later, the needle finally moved when Gaines launched his own MFA fellowship program in 2021. “I realized that instead of trying to get others interested, I needed to do it myself,” he says, crediting his recent rise in visibility (he was signed to Hauser & Wirth in 2018) and newfound financial means, and a supportive administration too.

In many ways, this long-overdue milestone can be traced back to Gaines’ arrival in Los Angeles in 1989. The city was an emerging art center not yet on the global scale of New York City, but apartment and New York satellite galleries as well as emerging white cubes like Regen Projects gave it its own gravitas. It wasn’t until around the mid-2000s, though, that Gaines saw a significant change. “The first canary in the coal mine was that the students stopped moving to New York,” he recalls. “Then in the early 2000s, the New York artists started moving to L.A., and the market expanded significantly. The whole idea of gaining significance from a New York connection dissolved, and L.A. became a real place where you could build a career.”

These latest works from Gaines’ ongoing “Numbers and Trees” series chart seemingly endless possibilities — and the artist’s own trajectory.

But who could build a career? Gaines found the answer discomforting. “The art scene seemed to be completely uninterested in the practice of Black artists,” he says. A certain “L.A. style” dominated — but it excluded artists of color whose work fell outside the white standard. “It’s also true that New York was just as bad,” Gaines concedes. “It was just larger, so there were more opportunities for minority artists to exhibit in already marginalized spaces, but they weren’t being shown in the white spaces at all.” White artists making figurative work were praised for depicting everyday life; Black artists doing the same were labeled as political — and those, like Gaines, making work that didn’t explicitly address identity were criticized for making white art. “Being Black was the problem — it wasn’t as much about the work itself,” he explains.

At the same time that Gaines was experiencing firsthand the drawbacks of a fledgling, insular art scene, a general feeling that the city was the future of the art world, siloed from the pressures of the market, began to pervade across Europe and South America, he recalls. Soon other cities began modeling themselves after L.A. rather than New York.

“L.A. was a sort of free, expressive environment for artists,” he says of the city’s allure to artists, “but that environment only existed for white artists.” Looking back over the years, Gaines outlines these patterns of discrimination: he recalls restaurants that refused service due to his skin color, openings (even some of his own) where he was treated like an outsider. “People didn’t know how to include me in the general environment because of the habits of racial thinking that were prominent at that time.” Despite and because of this, Gaines doubled down on his practice.

Born in Jim Crow-era Charleston, S.C. — his mother was a dressmaker and his father was a construction worker — Gaines would walk the dirt roads, past the small shack he spent his early years in, and question the arbitrary prejudices of the world around him. Who is in charge of assigning these roles? He asked himself. His family moved to Newark, N.J., when he was 5 years old, but the same social prejudices followed him. After developing an affinity for art in grade school, he went on to study it at Jersey City State College in the 1960s before attending graduate school at Rochester Institute of Technology (where he was the first Black student in the MFA program). He then taught art at the historically Black Mississippi Valley State College, at a time when the civil rights movement was growing strong. A teaching opportunity at Fresno State University in the late ’60s brought him west, where he sought refuge from the unnervingly high racial tensions on the Mississippi campus and leaned more heavily into conceptual art.

In the ’70s, Gaines remembers, art-making was considered the realm of the psyche and often “seen as natural rather than cultural.” But to the artist, everything is informed by structures of power, and to define a work as natural or intuitive protects it from critique. Disillusioned with subjective, surface-level modes of art-making, Gaines began to question his purpose. How might he not only underscore these underlying structures but also use them as a tool? Then he found a solution: “I needed to dismantle that system,” he says, “to put a firewall between what I would call an intuitive notion and my artistic practice.”

And so Gaines’ systems were born: layers of self-generating images developed from rule-based arithmetic, “with limits so extensive that you couldn’t imagine the boundaries.” Beneath every figurative form he creates, there is a grid-like sequence compelling us to question the latent networks in not only what we see, but how we respond.

He was first inspired by the patterns of Tantric Buddhist art, and later by the realization of the grid-like layout of trees. In 1975, soon after Gaines moved west, he photographed a walnut orchard in Fresno near the university and drew its silhouettes with numbers rather than lines. He began to expand his generative technique to faces, dancers and houseplants, but trees always remained a focal point.

“Trees as a species represent this idea of a system that can produce difference infinitely,” he says. “Rather than calculating these differences and samenesses, I use the shape of the tree and overlap them,” he says, something that could theoretically go on forever.

Once Gaines unlocked his system, he began to apply it to more explicitly social subject matter: In 1992, he juxtaposed mugshots and photos of crime scenes with images of the night sky. For a 2007 exhibition at LAXART, he installed a large glass cube with an LED display that reflected pollution sensors around Los Angeles. For his ongoing “Manifestos” series, which dates back to the ‘80s, he uses a method that turns text from Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin into equivalent musical notes. For his three-part project “The American Manifest,” he confronted the ongoing legacies of colonialism and slavery in America with a 110-foot-long sculpture resembling a ship from the slave trade.

As Gaines’ practice continues and his system advances, his work accumulates layers. Today, he muses that his trees (many nonnative to the American sites where he documents them) could represent immigrants and how they are reduced to bureaucratic data sets. This desire to create a structure so generative it is almost alive has also led Gaines to expand geographically: Inspired to show people places they would normally not see, he set out overseas to Tanzania, a country once implicated in the slave trade. There he photographed baobab and acacias.

Over half a century into his career, Gaines is still generating new ideas: soulful songs born from writing, paintings derived from numbers, critical ideas grown from landscapes. “I would have thought the idea of creating trees would have exhausted itself like 25 years ago. But it keeps producing things.”