NEW YORK, NY.- The art fair in Miami begins in an hour. We are installed, ready. I notice my business cards are incorrect. One of our handouts has a misprint.

Livia says, “Can you please come see this painting?” She means it’s at another booth; a work she likely wants us to buy. I didn’t sell anything as yet, I want to say. “It isn’t far,” she persists. “It’s fabulous.”

I had better look. It’s our history. Her tugging on me to look at a Marie Watt work at The Denver Art Museum when I was focused on the design of an upcoming Jeffrey Gibson exhibit. Tugging on me in Singapore to see a small work by Anne Samat.

There’s a difference in her look, her tone, when she thinks the work is important.

Not far at Zidoun Bossuyt they are excited that Livia is back and there are two paintings by an artist whose works I have never seen, one particularly powerful. “Give me a few hours,” I tell the gallery. My style is to see it a few times before I can decide, but Livia already knows.

Much later, after the purchase she tells me that that the young boy is the artist’s son, she is certain. Before the fair opens the next day I spend more time with the painting. A boy in shorts and sneakers leans into a strong wind; a helmet is adorned with feathers. His right outstretched hand in a boxing glove is pulling the unseen chariot. Shards of cloth and leather are flying. There’s a bird, a young woman, a checkered floor, in this filmic moment reminding perhaps of Oz.

Of course, this is his son, a young Black boy who will inevitably come face-to-face with the wizard, who will require the self-awareness, and determination to navigate these winds ahead, and as I see it the artist is hopeful, proud; but he knows the risks.

It makes perfect sense that Gates had a long career in television as a motion graphics artist and video editor. He worked with TV personalities and music artists creating video footage and promotional material and a reciprocal relationship evolved with his own art where he began casting family and friends as protagonists for his paintings. His unconsciously driven works created invented worlds, untethered in time, with heroes and bystanders. The future is always uncertain, but it is for us to lean in and help shape it.

Shaunté Gates (b. 1979) lives and works in Washington, D.C. He studied at Duke Ellington School of the Arts and Bowie State University. Gates was a participating artist in the Smithsonian Institution’s “Men of Change” four-year traveling exhibition spanning ten museums, including the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC, California African American Museum, Cincinnati Underground Railroad Museum and Washington State History Museum (2019-23). He has been awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Grant (2022) and residencies with The Nicholson Project (2023), The Kennedy Center (2019) and Washington Project for the Arts (2018; 2017). He has had solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater Gallery in NYC and Zidoun Bossuyt in Paris. His work is in numerous public and private collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Hudson Valley MOCA in Peekskill, NY. He has completed many public art commissions including Transcending, a painting commemorating the 140th anniversary of Howard University School of Law.
- Marc Straus