RICO GATSON
RICO GATSON
SPECTRAL VISIONS
511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011
UNDENIABLE ENERGY
By Siddhartha MitterDaylight dances in Rico Gatson’s studio. Several panes of the old industrial window carry a green or gold tint that animates the space, shifting with the weather and the time of day. The rays spark alchemies with Gatson’s paintings in progress—with the polyrhythmic, geometric patterns that organize them, and with their vibrant palette. Lately, the studio has grown ever more vibrant.
It’s high summer, and Gatson is working on the new paintings for this exhibition. The stereo plays Coltrane—John today, but Alice is also a favorite. The space is compact—not crowded so much as full, with works set close to one another. Those nearer to completion hang or rest against the wall. Those in earlier stages lay flat on tables and trestles. He has identified the form they will take and established the lines of the composition, but the colors are still hypotheses, some simply tentative letter codes jotted on the surface. They will find their values in the making.
“There is a system,” Gatson begins, then demurs, “but I don’t want it to seem too tight.” He needn’t worry. The variety in these works—the patterns that contrast and segment and overlap; the complex, bravura coloration—brim with the intuitive confidence of a brilliant and experienced improviser. Gatson’s latest paintings underscore how method—in art as in science—is a gateway, not a result. It succeeds when it opens new directions inside the work, when the revealed possibilities confound expectation.
It is a seeker’s approach, and Gatson holds a stated affinity for modern art’s mystics, like Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint. He is equally guided by the history of Black geometry in Africa and its diasporic expressions. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, by the scholar
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Ron Eglash, is a staple reference on his bookcase. Pattern, rhythm, and geometry organize textiles, hair design, architecture, music, and cosmology in the Black world. They are spiritual and socially constitutive. They emerge in the quilts of Gee’s Bend, and in W. E. B. Du Bois’ data visualizations of Black economics and social life.
But Gatson’s process is also that of a sculptor; after all, sculpture was the focus of his Yale graduate training. Even as he has found greater success in two dimensions, the third has remained present and active. It’s suggested in his predilection for working on hard surfaces—doors and fabricated boards, robust to the touch, conveying resilience and the symbolism of passageways. Sculpture manifests in the room as a kind of force field, governed by the boundless interplay of his compositions and that shifting, shimmering light.
This work is energy work. It is why Gatson holds fast to this modest studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which he has kept for years, with its window that he likens to a readymade. It is why he composes multiple paintings at once, not as a series but as an organism, a whole. “I want there to be dialogue between things in space,” he says. “There is a vibration.”
I ask Gatson where he locates risk in his practice, these days.
The risk, he answers, is not rooted in a move, in artistic or conceptual gesture applied to a particular artwork. “The risk-taking is more in establishing this way of working,” he says. “I want there to be this undeniable energy within each piece.”
Abstraction, as a category or language, never quite captures what Gatson is up to. For one thing, his art can be explicitly figural, even bordering on narrative. Operating since the 1990s in sculpture, video, drawing, and beyond, he has taken on not just symbolic language but specific images from Black and American history, notably by employing collage or the transfer of archival materials.
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He has dealt this way, in the past, with sinister American information—lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, the killers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam who executed Emmett Till.
His work that has enjoyed the broadest public reach is his long-running Icons series, which he initiated in 2007. It is celebratory—a contrast to his more somber subject matter, on one level, but also a response to it, attentive to the dialectics of history. These luminous pieces in pencil, each honoring a major figure in Black culture, music, politics, or social history, are less portraits than, again, energy studies. He renders each by appropriation of a black-and-white archival photograph that he places near the paper’s edge, and from which impeccable beams of color radiate across the page. In his permanent installation for the 167th Street subway station (located at 167th Street and Grand Concourse), eight of these Icons, all with ties to the Bronx, grace the platform wall in glass mosaic.
Now come paintings that unlock worlds. In Gatson’s new works, we experience a kind of interstellar rush as the patterns and forms that he has long explored in his painting practice seem to accelerate toward some sort of transcendent exit velocity. They are buzzing.
Triangles and inverted triangles, circles of various diameters, vertical or horizontal stripes in negative space, aligned segments, remain his favored graphical tactics to organize the field. But new things are happening. The overlaps have grown more intense, their geometries more involved. The color decisions are intuitive and irregular. New forms are birthed in the vortex. Some are implicit, relying for their manifestation on the play of optics, the mind’s eye. Others are right there in the design. They break and tumble across the surface. Getting loose. Getting free.
Here is where Gatson’s project takes leave of its affinities with, notably, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, which that artist postulated as advanced studies in form, as expressed in the conceit of their instruction-like titles. The inspiration is clear, but it’s a tangent connection, like two lines that touch
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then separate again. For Gatson brings to these paintings the whole corpus of Black philosophy and engagement that animates what came before. The information, the archive, are wrenching and indelible. Therefore, there is a prospect as well: liberation.
Gatson’s studio shorthand makes the references plain. “We’ve been calling the paintings with triangles and circles the ‘council paintings,’” he tells me. “Because it’s like a group of forms, loosely figurative in my mind.” An alignment of tall, pointed triangles carries, of course, a jarring connotation in American history, and in one work, Untitled (Luminous Bodies I), two areas in a particular pink— a new entrant in his palette—propose an explicit nod to Philip Guston’s Klan paintings.
“Guston is someone I think about a lot, in terms of painting, though I’m working in purely geometrical forms,” Gatson says. I ask him to elaborate. “Because he was flawed, human and radical in how he changed,” Gatson answers. “He made his best work in those last ten years. He was shunned for it, ostracized—and it’s indelible. It’s powerful and poignant work. It’s loose, it’s poetry. I’m not saying that’s happening for me, but there are these forms.”
Other motifs also track to histories of violence and resistance—concentric circles have their origin in the idea of the target, for instance. Now they are cosmic targets, Gatson says, set loose by the fractal release in their overlapping rings. “I’m usually responding to something real and actually in the world,” he says, “but on a subconscious level.” The central paired elements that mirror but never quite touch in Untitled (Spectral Visions) appeared to him in a half-waking state one morning, holding back just short of a direct reference. They seemed to allude to islands in space, he says, or to keys—again the doors of perception—again passage and gateway. In the studio, the work was not yet finished, those core elements installed but the background still in play.
The “totems” are another element of shorthand for Gatson’s striking tall board works, which in past expressions divided into segments inspired by, among other sources, the patterning of
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social and ritual information in textile traditions such as kente. They have grown wilder, whether deepening within the pattern—notice the layering, the subtle shifting in density—or escaping it, like these jagged irregular forms in green, blue, purple, and orange that seem to tumble down the darkened plane. In the studio, seven of these planks rest close together against the wall, where they simultaneously clash and harmonize. He views them as an ensemble, he says, and invites them to switch places, mutable and alignable in any sequence.
In the past year and a half, Gatson traveled several times to Birmingham, Alabama, where he was developing works for an atrium commission at the Birmingham Museum of Art. For one wall, he produced a painting in the Icons vein honoring the city’s Civil Rights movement hero, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, with members of the community assisting in its completion. Opposite is a vinyl mural work that is all geometric forms. It is nonfigural but also an homage to a scion of Birmingham—the jazz composer and band leader Sun Ra, whose contributions, no less crucial, operated on astral planes.
With his own deep roots in Georgia, Gatson feels the South on a visceral level, but in Birmingham the research was local and specific, rhythmed by exchange with those who remember the struggle or carry on in its legacy. Visiting the 16th Street Baptist Church, site of the terrible 1963 bombing, he was deeply affected. It had inspired a work that he had newly begun, he says, but he came away from Birmingham with something more—a kind of confirmation of purpose, ever-deepening the dimensions of the work that escape any art criticism or art history parameters: the spiritual aspect, to give it language.
In the living presence of the freedom struggle, the stakes clarified. Spirit. Transformation. “It’s the possibility for transcendence,” he says. “The transference of my energy as a being, hopefully a spiritual being. I have to believe in that power, the potential for healing.”
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Siddhartha Mitter is a journalist and critic based in New York City.
Untitled (Double Consciousness), 2022
Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 48 inches 91.4 x 121.9 cm
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Untitled (Expanded Light Consciousness II), 2022
Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 80 inches 91.4 x 203.2 cm
Untitled (Four Winds), 2022 Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 48 inches 91.4 x 121.9 cm
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Untitled (Luminous Bodies I), 2022
Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 80 inches 91.4 x 203.2 cm
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Untitled (Luminous Bodies II), 2022
Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 80 inches 91.4 x 203.2 cm
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Untitled (Magic Diamonds II), 2022
Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 80 inches 91.4 x 203.2 cm
Untitled (Magic Star I), 2022 Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 48 inches 91.4 x 121.9 cm
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Untitled (Malcolm In The Spirit), 2022
Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 80 inches 91.4 x 203.2 cm
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Untitled (Seven Panels), 2022
Acrylic paint on wood, in seven parts
Overall dimensions: 96 x 128 inches
244.5 x 326.4 cm
Each panel: 96 x 11 inches
244.5 x 29.2 cm
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Untitled (Spectral Visions), 2022
Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 80 inches 91.4 x 203.2 cm
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Untitled (Triple Consciousness), 2022
Acrylic paint and glitter on wood 36 x 80 inches 91.4 x 203.2 cm
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30 Bell, 2022
Color pencil and photograph collage on paper 22 x 30 inches
55.9 x 76.2 cm
Cicely, 2022
Color pencil and photograph collage on paper 22 x 30 inches 55.9 x 76.2 cm
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Don, 2022
Color pencil and photograph collage on paper 22 x 30 inches
55.9 x 76.2 cm
Elbert, 2022
Color pencil and photograph collage on paper 22 x 30 inches
55.9 x 76.2 cm
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38 Isaac, 2022
Color pencil and photograph collage on paper 22 x 30 inches
55.9 x 76.2 cm
40 Sidney, 2022
Color pencil and photograph collage on paper 22 x 30 inches
55.9 x 76.2 cm
RICO GATSON
Born in Augusta, GA in 1966 Lives and works in New York, NY
EDUCATION
1991
MFA, Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven, CT 1989
BFA, Bethel University, St. Paul, MN
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2022
“Spectral Visions,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Wall to Wall: Rico Gatson,” Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
“Rico Gatson: Recent Work,” Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, AL
2020
“Ghosts,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Rico Gatson: Power Portraits,” Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN
2019
“Bridge Projects: Rico Gatson: You are Light,” Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, NY
“Smelling the Wind,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York, NY
2018
“My Eyes Have Seen,” Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, NY
2017
“Rico Gatson: 2007-2017,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
2016
“Power Lines,” Samsøñ Projects, Boston, MA
2014
“Rico Gatson: When She Speaks,” Studio 10, New York, NY
2013
“The Promise of Light,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY “2013 Ginsberg Artist in Residence, Rico Gatson,” Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College, Beloit, WI
2011
“Rico Gatson: Three Trips Around the Block,” Exit Art, New York, NY “History Lessons,” Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, VT
2009
“Dark Matter,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
2008
“Black Magic/Black Power,” Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA Pocket Utopia, New York, NY Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, MN
2006
“African Fractals,” Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
2005
“Meditations on Race and Religion,” Olson Gallery, Bethel University, St. Paul, MN
2004
“History Lessons/Clandestine,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
2003
“Rico Gatson: Recent Works,” Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, MN
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2001
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
Galerie Serge Ziegler, Zürich, Switzerland
2000
“Fire,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY 1999
“Home Sweet Home,” Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY
1996
“Project Room,” Momenta Art, New York, NY
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2022
“Rico Gatson & Cydne Jasmin Coleby,” Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, France
“Color Code,” McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA
“Light Play,” Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
“The Grid and the Curve,” JTT, New York, NY
“Summer Drift,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Pattern Recognition” (curated by Amy Lincoln), Sperone Westwater, New York, NY
“GEOMETRIES” (curated by Damien Davis), Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art, New York, NY
“Singing in Unison” (curated by Phong Bui), Rail Curatorial Projects, New York, NY
“Cosmic Geometries,” The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, New York, NY
2021
“Annotations & Improvisations” (curated by Kristen Becker), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Black American Portraits” (curated by Christine Y. Kim), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
“RE: REPRESENTATION,” Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, LA
“Sacred Spaces: Art and Spirituality at the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York,” Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York, New York, NY
“Dialogues in African American Abstract Painting,” Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA “Visions and Nightmares,” Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY “Naked in Brooklyn,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY “Wood, Works: Raw, Cut, Carved, Covered,” Sperone Westwater, New York, NY
“Light” (curated by Rico Gatson), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“RE:Growth, A Celebration of Art, Riverside Park, and the New York Spirit” (curated by Karin Bravin), Riverside Park Conservancy, New York, NY
2020
“True Lines,” Over The Influence, Los Angeles, CA “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
“We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz,” Jewish Museum, New York, NY “Geometries” (curated by Damien Davis), Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art, New York, NY
2019
“New Symphony of Time,” Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS “Historicity,” Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA “Summer 2019,” Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, NY “Rico Gatson and Baseera Khan: Free to Be,” Jenkins Johnson Projects, New York, NY
2018
“Win Sourced Scribes,” Mother Gallery, New York, NY “Art + Activism: Drawing the Line,” Children’s Museum of Art, New York, NY
“Jazz and Love,” La Vieille Charité, Marseille, France “The Art of Protest,” Areté Gallery, New York, NY “Isness,” Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY
2017
“Identity Document,” Gallery Bergen, Bergen Community College, Paramus, NJ
“We the People,” Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN
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“1967: Parallels in Black Art and Rebellion,” Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI
“Sharper Image,” Present Company, New York, NY “Art on the Front Lines,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
“Spielplatz,” Geary Contemporary, New York, NY
2016
“Moving Image,” The Tunnel, New York, NY
“Phantom,” OSMOS, New York, NY
“Jameco Exchange,” No Longer Empty, New York, NY
“Accumulation: 5000 Years of Objects, Fictions, and Conversations,” Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, MA
“Every Five Minutes,” Columbus State University, Columbus, GA “Language Product,” Boston Arts Academy, Boston, MA
2015
“Devotion,” Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York, NY
“The Raft,” The Boiler, Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY
“When Artists Speak Truth...,” The 8th Floor, New York, NY
“All Killer No Filler,” Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY
“Magic Objects” (curated by Rico Gatson), 99 Cent Plus Gallery, New York, NY
“Make Their Gold Teeth Ache,” Moberg Gallery, Des Moines, IA
“between a place and candy: new works in pattern + repetition + motif,” 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York, NY
“Painting is Dead?!,” Figure One, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL
“RESPOND,” Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY
“Pay to Play,” ODETTA, Brooklyn, NY
2014
“CEMETARIUM” (presented by Regina Rex), Emerson Dorsch, Miami, FL
“Guns in the Hands of Artists,” Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, LA
“Pierogi XX: Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY
“SEVEN/VIDEO,” The Boiler, Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY
2013
“15 Artists in Black & White,” Outlet Fine Arts, Brooklyn, NY
“The Ceiling Should Be Green,” P!, New York, NY
“American Beauty,” Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, NY
2012
“New, New York,” Essl Museum, Vienna, Austria
“Bigger Than Shadows,” Dodge Gallery, New York, NY “Rico Gatson and Christ Larson,” Trinity Christian College, Palos Heights, IL
“Lyrical Color,” Pocket Utopia, Brooklyn, NY “Paper Variables,” Dieu Donné, New York, NY “Rico Gatson and Angela Dufresne,” Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronx, NY
“Every Exit is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art,” Exit Art, New York, NY
“The Bearden Project,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY “What I Know” (curated by Jason Andrew), New York Center for Art and Media Studies, New York, NY
2011
“Per-son-age,” Famous Accountants, Brooklyn, NY “Taking Shape,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY “It’s All in the Peripherals,” Mellwood Art Center, Louisville, KY “Blink! Light, Sound & The Moving Image,” Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO “Geometric Days,” Exit Art, New York, NY
“En-Garde II: omg,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
2010
“The Jewel Thief,” Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY “Divide & Conquer,” The Spirol Gallery, Quinebaug Valley Community College, Danielson, CT
“Resurrectine,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY “Ocketopia,” Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, NY “Global/National,” Exit Art, New York, NY
“NEW year, NEW work, NEW space,” Storefront, Brooklyn, NY
2009
“Incarnational Aesthetics,” NYCAMS, New York, NY “Reduced Visibility,” Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX
“You Killed My Pretty Things,” St. Claude Gallery, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA
“2009 Bushwick Biennial: Finally Utopic,” Pocket Utopia, Brooklyn, NY
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“BLACK&WHITEWORKS,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
“Art and Text: Images, Concepts, and Insights,” Dadian Gallery, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C.
2008
“The Labyrinth Wall: From Mythology to Reality,” Exit Art, New York, NY
“Drawing Review: 37 Years of Works on Paper,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
“Filmic,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
“Prospect 1,” Prospect, New Orleans, LA “intransit,” Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, NY
“ALONE/TOGETHER,” Talman + Monroe, New York, NY
2007
“Red Badge of Courage,” Newark Arts Council, Newark, NJ
“System Failure,” Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York, NY “death & love in MODERN TIMES,” Dinter Fine Art, New York, NY
“STAND,” New York Center for Art and Media Studies, New York, NY
“En Perfecto Desorden,” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
“Most Humans Do Not Know Better,” Brooke Alexander Editions, New York, NY
“Digital Political Time Lapse,” Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY
“Unfathom,” Max Protech Gallery, New York, NY
“Heco en Bushwick,” Norte Maar, Brooklyn, NY
“Double-Edged Abstraction,” g-module, Paris, France
“Multiples,” Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, VT
“Sihouette,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
“Intelligent Design,” Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY
“M*A*S*H,” The Helena, New York, NY
2006
“Drift,” Bronx River Arts Center, Bronx, NY
“The Studio Visit,” Exit Art, New York, NY
2005
“Greater New York 2005,” P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY
“African Queen,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
“About Face: a selection of artists’ videos,” Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University, Bakersfield, CA
2004
“Black Belt,” The Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA “Fight or Flight,” Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, NY
“FACE OFF,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY “Open House: Working in Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY “Video X: 10 Years of Video with Momenta Art,” Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY
2003
“Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self,” International Center of Photography, New York, NY “Black Belt,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY “The 3rd Photo-Media Festival,” Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea “Living Units,” Triple Candie, New York, NY “Decade,” Schroeder Romero, Brooklyn, NY “Ameri©an Dre@m,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY
“Living Inside the Grid,” New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY “Veni Vidi Video,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
2002
“Spinning,” MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA “Knockout Fairground,” Washington Square East Galleries, New York, NY
“Americas Remixed,” Comune di Milano, Milan, Italy “Season Review: Fall ‘01 - Spring ‘02,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY “Paris Exchange,” Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY “Enough About Me,” Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY “Race in Digital Space,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
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2001
“A Painting for Over the Sofa (That’s Not Necessarily a Painting),” Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, FL, traveled to Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; Walton Arts Center, Fayetteville, AR; William Patterson University, Wayne, NJ; Fuller Museum, Brockton, MA; Huntington Museum, Huntington, WV; Lakeview Museum, Peoria, IL and University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
“Masking: Rico Gatson (Kindred) and Andres Serrano (Klansman),” The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA “Brooklyn!,” Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL
“Cold Blood,” Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY
“Race in Digital Space,” MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
“FREESTYLE,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY and The Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA
2000
“Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project 2000,” The Jewish Museum, New York, NY
“Videotheque Kunst Zurich 2000,” Galerie Serge Ziegler, Zürich, Switzerland
“Never Never Land,” University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, traveled to Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, FL and Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, Camden, NJ
“The Light Show,” Gale Gates, Brooklyn, NY
1999
“The Flat Files,” The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA
“Group Exhibition,” Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN
“Working In Brooklyn: Beyond Technology,” Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
“Rage for Art,” Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY
“Video Program,” Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York, NY
1998
“Hybro Video,” Exit Art, New York, NY
“Current Undercurrent: Working in Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
“Artists Respond to 2001: Space Odyssey,” Williamsburg Art & Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY
“The View from Denver,” Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria “Gramercy International Art Fair,” Gramercy Park Hotel, New York, NY
1996
“Video Faz,” Art & Idea, Mexico City, Mexico “Cadmium-Cathode,” Sauce, Brooklyn, NY “Benefit Show,” Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY “Constriction,” Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY
1995
“Presence,” Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT
“On the Lam,” Thicket Gallery, New York, NY “Other Rooms,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY “Options 2,” Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
1994
“Faux,” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY “FIRED-A Late-Nite Comedy Show,” No Bias Space, North Bennington, VT and Thicket Gallery, New York, NY “Benefit Show,” Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY 1993
“Group Exhibition,” Art Space, New Haven, CT
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
2022
“Guest Faculty Lecture: Shoko Teruyama and Rico Gatson,” Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO “Artist-led Art Exploration with Chris Bogia and Rico Gatson,” Morningside Area Alliance, New York, NY
Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, NY
2021
Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, NY
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2020
“Rico Gatson Virtual Studio Tour,” Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, NY
“Rico Gatson: Power Portraits,” Delaware County Community College, Media, PA
2018
“Fine Arts Visiting Artists Lecture Series: Rico Gatson,” Pratt Institute, New York, NY
2015
Artist lecture, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA
Artist lecture, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2014
Artist lecture, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA
SELECT COLLECTIONS
Bethel College, St. Paul, MN
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Malcolm X Institute, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN
Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC
Peter Norton Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
University of San Diego, San Diego, CA
Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MI
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
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Published on the occasion of the exhibition
RICO GATSON SPECTRAL VISIONS
8 December 2022 – 28 January 2023
Miles McEnery Gallery
515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011
tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com
Publication © 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery
All rights reserved Essay © 2022 Siddhartha Mitter
Director of Exhibitions
Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY
Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY
Dan Bradica, New York, NY
Color separations by Echelon, Los Angeles, CA
Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY
ISBN: 978-1-949327-91-5
Cover: Untitled (Expanded Light Consciousness II), (detail), 2022
