Artist Playlist: Charles Gaines

For this series, Dia invites artists to curate a playlist that brings together music that they are listening to right now or that has been meaningful to them during their life.

This first playlist consists of music that is related to the concepts that underlie my work, such as patterns and their relationship to politics, themes that can be found in the work of Steve Reich and Miles Davis. This collection also reflects my interest in diverse musical forms and the various ways pattern and melody unfold, as well as how dependent they are on each other. For me, realizing images through visual patterns is like creating melody out of rhythmic patterns in sound. I’m also interested in the emotive power that pattern and repetition can produce, which we can hear in the music of Anton Bruckner and Kendrick Lamar. 

The second playlist features selections by my studio assistants. I wanted a generational contrast, so I asked them to produce a playlist. Their names are listed below: 

Adrian Abela
Julia O. Bianco
Kristen Bradford
Cara Chan
Adrian Culverson
Julia Garder
Aimee Goguen
Dakota Higgins
Michael Kennedy Costa
Audrey Moyer
Diana Relth
Zori Swanegan
Sichong Xie 

—Charles Gaines

Listen to Charles Gaines’s playlist here.

Listen to Charles Gaines’s studio playlist here.

Charles Gaines was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1944. He lives in Los Angeles.