LUCIA ZEZZA | DATE 2/15/2025

Artbook at MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents Charles Gaines and Huey Copeland launching 'The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism'

Saturday, February 15, at 3 PM EST, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents a conversation between artist Charles Gaines and teacher, critic, editor, scholar, administrator and curator Huey Copeland on the exhibition catalog, The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism.

Q&A followed by a book signing.

Event livestreamed on Instagram at @artbookps1.

Please RSVP for the event and pre-order a signed copy here.

"Black political art does not sacrifice the signifier, multivocality, or the formal; black political artists recognize the complex problem of realizing subjectivity within this overwhelming oppositional binarism of pure knowledge and culture." —Charles Gaines, UC Riverside Lecture on The Theater of Refusal

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, working across Fluxus, Conceptualism, assemblage, photography, and new forms of installation. 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, marks the 30th anniversary of Gaines and Lord’s exhibition and publication. Coedited by Rhea Anastas, Charles Gaines, Jamillah James, and Eric Golo Stone, The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism 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.

Artists include: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Green, David Hammons, Ben Patterson, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat Ward Willams, Fred Wilson

Contributors include: 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

Charles Gaines (b. 1944 Charleston, South Carolina) is a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art. 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 is an Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh. 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).

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
Charles Gaines and Huey Copeland launching 'The Theater of Refusal Black Art and Mainstream Criticism'
Saturday, February 15, at 4 PM
22-25 Jackson Ave (at 46th Ave.)
Long Island City, NY 11101
(718) 433-1088
RSVP and pre-order a signed book here.