People

Malik Gaines is a writer and artist. His published articles include “The Quadruple-Consciousness of Nina Simone” in Women & Performance, “City After 50 Years’ Living: LA’s Differences in Relation” in Art Journal, and many short essays and interviews about art and performance for journals, magazines, museum publications, and artists’ monographs. His forthcoming book, Excesses of the Sixties: Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left considers 1960s performance in a transnational political context.

Gaines has performed and exhibited extensively with the group My Barbarian. The trio has presented work at venues including MoMA, The Kitchen, New Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Participant Inc. (New York), LACMA, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, MOCA (Los Angeles), SFMoMA (San Francisco), ICA (Philadelphia), Museo El Eco (Mexico City), Power Plant, (Toronto), ICA (London), De Appel (Amsterdam), El Matadero (Madrid), Peres Projects (Berlin), Torpedo (Oslo), Galleria Civica (Trento), Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), Yaffo 23 (Jerusalem) and many others. The group has been included in the Whitney, Montreal, California and Performa Biennials and the Baltic Triennial and has received grants and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Creative Capital, City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs and Art Matters. Their work has been discussed in the New Yorker, New York Times, LA Times, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Bomb and various international newspapers, and by scholars including Shannon Jackson in The Drama Review, Tavia Nyong’o in Social Text, and José Muñoz in his book “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.”

Gaines is assistant professor of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is also a visiting faculty member in Film/Video at Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts. From 2011-15 he served as assistant professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Hunter College, CUNY.  Gaines holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA and an MFA in Writing from CalArts.