NEW YORK, NY.- Creative Time, Governors Island Arts, and Times Square Arts are presenting the first public art exhibition by Charles Gaines, The American Manifest. The serialized public art installation will unfold in three parts, or chapters, across three locations over the course of two years — Times Square, Governors Island, and Cincinnati. The project debuted in New York City on July 13, 2022 in Times Square with a new iteration of the artist’s pioneering Manifestos performances coupled with an installation of sculptures of the complex root systems of the American Sweetgum tree on view through the summer. Moving Chains, a monumental, kinetic sculptural work sited on Governors Island in New York Harbor opens next in early October 2022 before journeying to the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati in the summer of 2023.
Tracing the flow of these northeastern waterways — the historically charged rivers and ports of New York City and Cincinnati’s Ohio River, which are not often considered in relation to each other — Gaines offers a multifaceted interrogation of the dual role of the northern states in both maintaining and abolishing slavery, and the enduring implications of the racialized systems, myths, and logics that underpin the nation’s economic and legal foundations that persist today. Through large-scale sonic and sculptural works, the project grapples with the entangled systems of property, citizenship, displacement, and freedom that enables and furthers racial capitalism, a mechanism for enforcing white supremacy in the United States of America. Gaines’s work for The American Manifest originates with the 1857 Dred and Harriet Scott historic Supreme Court decision, which decreed that people of African ancestry were not U.S. citizens and therefore could not sue for their right to freedom, and demands the viewer contend with the legacies and afterlives of chattel slavery, Manifest Destiny, and colonialism.
“By exploring the Dred and Harriet Scott Decision, The American Manifest is intended both critically and poetically to unpack the complexity of America's humanist ideals. It is intended to take us through the slippery contradictions that make up the American narrative,” said Charles Gaines.
Charles Gaines has been a pivotal figure in conceptual art for the past five decades, known for his body of work engaging formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. The concept of identity politics has played a central role within Gaines’s oeuvre, and the radical approach he employs addresses issues of race in ways that transcend the limits of representation.
“The American Manifest is a sharp look at the history of the United States and how our laden past manifests in our contemporary struggles. It is only through an interrogation and understanding of these entangled histories that we may face our systemic societal ills,” said Creative Time Executive Director Justine Ludwig.
