The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism

Author: Charles Gaines
Publisher: Dancing Foxes Press
Year: 2024
Pages: 208
ISBN: 978-1954947108

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 related to the reception of the exhibition’s artists in a reading room.

This publication reprints the eponymous publication that documented the show, which contained essays by Maurice Berger, Lord, and Gaines and the transcript of a roundtable that included a range of artists and writers. 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.