Malik Gaines

Malik Gaines is a writer and artist based in Los Angeles. Gaines has written arts criticism and journalism for numerous publications including The Advocate, ArtUS, Art Papers, Art Review, Artforum and Frieze. He has written catalogue essays for the Studio Museum in Harlem, the 1st Moscow Biennial, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Secession, Vienna, and others and has contributed monograph texts for artists including Glenn Ligon and Wangechi Mutu. Gaines has worked as a curator to organize exhibitions including "Fade: African American Artists in Los Angeles" (2004) for the City of LA, "Efface" (2006) at Steve Turner Gallery, Beverly Hills, "Read Me! Text in Art" (2007) at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, as well as "Kalup Linzy: All My Churen" (2006), "Talks About Acts" (2007), and "Anna Sew Hoy: Pow" (2008) at LAXART, where Gaines is Adjunct Curator. In 2003, Gaines received a Penny McCall Foundation Award for his work as a critic and curator. Gaines is a founding member of the performance art collective My Barbarian, which has performed or exhibited work at venues including LACMA, REDCAT, UCLA Hammer Museum, MAK Center's Schindler House, and LACE, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, Joe's Pub, Studio Museum in Harlem, Participant, Inc., New Museum, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; The Power Plant, Toronto; De Appel, Amsterdam; Peres Projects Gallery, Berlin; Torpedo, Oslo; El Matadero, Madrid; and Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy. My Barbarian has been included in the 2005 and 2007 Performa Biennials, the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, and the 2007 Montreal Biennial. Gaines received a B.A. in History from UCLA (1996) and an MFA in Writing from Cal Arts' School of Critical Studies (1999) and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Theater and Performance studies at UCLA, which he expects to complete in 2010.